Tower crane is increasingly becoming one of the key components of temporary site layout facilities in most construction projects. Determining the location of tower crane is an essential task of layout planning, which is also the central focus of this study. The optimization of tower crane location depends on many interrelated factors, including site constraints, shape and size of the buildings, type and quantity of required materials, crane configurations, crane type, and construction site layout. These factors vary from one project to another, resulting to complicated site layout strategies and approaches. This fact makes the crane location problem impractical to be solved depending on experience of practitioners only which was gained by assuming and through trial and error. This paper aimed at developing an optimization model to solve tower crane location problem in construction sites. The objective was to minimize the total transportation time. Genetic Algorithms (GA) optimization technique is utilized to solve the problem. A numerical example is presented to test and validate the results obtained by the model. ª 2015 Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Discrete-event simulation has been widely used technique in analyzing construction operations for the past three decades due to its great effect on optimizing cost and productivity. In this paper we will present Arena as a tool for simulating earthwork operations, the advantage of Arena is its easiness and flexibility in simulating most kinds of models in different areas of construction. A case study will be presented, a model will be built and results obtained to reveal the mentioned objectives. ª 2015 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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