A Two-Stage Decision-Making Method Based on WebGIS for Bulk Material Transportation of Hydropower Construction

Bulk materials are necessary for hydropower construction. The bulk materials transportation (BMT) scheme is a guiding document for material supply, and its selection has a significant influence on hydropower construction. Since the BMT problem includes transportation planning and scheme selection issues simultaneously, only a small number of studies have focused on it. This paper presents a theoretical two-stage decision-making method (TDM), which innovatively combines the path optimization method and the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method to solve the BMT problem. In the first stage, a multi-source path optimization model is established to optimize the transportation network and obtain a set of alternatives from each supply point to the construction site. In the second stage, considering the factors of economy, risk and construction progress, the MCDM method is adopted to select the optimal scheme from the alternatives. In addition, web crawler technology is used to obtain the transportation network data from the public WebGIS automatically. Case results show that the TDM can effectively solve this problem, and its result keeps consistent with engineering practice; with the help of the web crawler, it can reduce the design task time from months to days. Therefore, the TDM based on WebGIS can benefit hydropower construction design efficiency.