Lognormal Distribution Provides an Optimum Representation of the Concrete Delivery and Placement Process
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 131, Issue 2
Abstract
The process of concrete supply and delivery exhibits traits of random nature, which render control arduous. This random nature allows concrete placement operations to be considered as a stochastic system and therefore cannot be analyzed by deterministic techniques. In modeling the process realistically, it may be necessary to recreate the variability through fitting a sufficiently flexible theoretical probability distribution to observed data. There is a significant body of work relating to the probability distributions which represent general construction activities. However, there is a lack of literature aimed at determining the optimum representative of the concrete placement process. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify a sufficiently flexible representative of this process. To this end, construction data were collected from a number of concrete pours in Scotland, U.K. To identify a suitable distribution in this context, a computer package, PDFit, is presented. It is founded upon the production of probability density functions of select theoretical probability distributions plotted against the histogram of the input data. The principal method of assessment is a visual comparison of the shape of the probability density function and the input data histogram. This paper presents the lognormal distribution as a sufficiently flexible theoretical probability distribution to represent the concrete placing process.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 131 • Issue 2 • February 2005
Pages: 230 - 238
Copyright
© 2005 ASCE.
History
Received: Nov 12, 2002
Accepted: Feb 10, 2004
Published online: Feb 1, 2005
Published in print: Feb 2005
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