Reducing Waste from Cutting Reinforcing Steel in Construction Projects

Abstract

For concrete construction, one problem that a constructor often encounters is that there is a large amount of fraction of reinforcing steel caused by cutting. This study shows a method of reducing waste from the cutting. The study is divided into two steps. The first step is collecting bar bending lists and percentage of wastes caused by cutting steels. The second step is finding a method to minimize waste due to the cutting. The research implements the combination theory in order to generate all possible cutting patterns of reinforcing steels and mathematical programming theory to solve for the patterns that yield minimum waste. A software program is developed in order to generate cutting patterns, formulate mathematical model, and solve the model. The result shows that the wastes of reinforcing steels from the analysis are much less than the wastes of reinforcing steels from the collected data.