About us Volvo Construction Equipment, a business area within the Volvo Group, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of construction equipment such as wheel loaders, excavators, articulated haulers, road development equipment and compact equipment. Production facilities are located in Europe, Asia, North America and Latin America. Please read more about us and apply to the thesis at our h...

Construction equipment constitutes a significant portion of investment in fixed assets by large contractors. To make the right decisions on equipment repair, rebuilding, disposal, or equipment fleet optimization to maximize the return of investment, the contractors need to predict the residual value of heavy construction equipment to an acceptable level of accuracy. Current practice of using ru...

Planning in the construction industry, as is well known plays an important part in the successful outcome of a project. How a task has to be dealt with and with which tools is part of the engineers work load and it is in their responsibility to assure that this planned work is carried out on time and within its constraints. Construction equipment is among these tools that have to be carefully c...

The construction industry annually experiences one of the highest fatality rates among the industrial sectors in the United States. The factors that contribute to this reputation include the nature of the work, human behavior, the tools and equipment involved, and also the compact work zones. Industrial fatalities are investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Whi...

Equipment logistics, maintenance, and repair are important aspects of construction equipment management. A well-managed equipment fleet helps reduce downtime, as well as total maintenance and repair costs. With quickly growing fleets of equipment, large contractors tend to divert the maintenance and repair of equipment from equipment managers to project managers. As a result, the equipment mana...

This paper introduces the statistical error modeling approach for a computercontrolled large-scale manipulator (LSM). The LSM is sufficiently representative of several types of construction equipment to be able to serve as a general test bed. In the analysis, three factors which are measurable in real time: distance, hydraulic pressure, and payload, were varied to determine their influence on p...

Current approaches in planning building site equipment evaluate static periods, e.g. construction phases. As a consequence these states provide a rudimentary optimized layout plan, however without considering the material flow and corresponding interactions in a precise form. Due to dynamic processes, which could obstruct the material flow, an adaption of the equipment layout during individual ...

Heavy construction equipment is routinely used on construction projects that entail earthmoving operations. Owning and operating these machines may comprise a significant portion of the project costs. An important element of the owning costs is the residual value. However, the nature of the residual value of construction equipment is largely unknown. Ongoing research at Virginia Tech examines t...