A construction site layout planning study for dust reduction

Dust pollution generated by construction activities poses a serious threat to the health of workers. Studies have mainly focused on dust removal equipment, with relatively few studies on construction site layout planning (CSLP) for dust pollution reduction. This work designed a novel multiobjective CSLP model that integrates dust diffusion with the standard CSLP model (safety risk and transportation cost). After performance analysis between different solvers, our new model was solved by the popular Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA-III). Furthermore, weight sensitivity analysis was also conducted to determine the optimal weights of model objectives. Finally, the practicality was validated through several construction examples. The experimental results indicated (1) the optimal layout had average reductions of 9.1% in safety risk, 4.3% in transportation cost, and 40.4% in dust pollution compared to the original layout; and (2) NSGA-III demonstrated superior convergence and diversity compared to other competitive algorithms under both hypervolume and inverted generational distance metrics. This study enhances dust reduction approaches in the construction industry by integrating dust control into the preconstruction optimization of CSLP, enhancing the accuracy of dust pollution predictions and offering practical solutions for dust mitigation.