In the life cycles of all infrastructure, construction is an important phase among others. Different construction methods and techniques would affect the materials and energy consumption to different extent which in turn affect the carbon emissions from the construction process. Of many factors that affect the construction process, tower cranes, which transport materials and equipment on site, are of practical significance. Thus their use and scheduling in the construction process are worth studying for possible savings of costs in terms of materials and energy consumption and time to completion, which will result in different carbon emissions from the construction process.
In the recent decades, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has greatly increased the productivity of many industries as well as our daily life. However, this development has not brought dividends to construction process. One typical example is that, although information technology (IT) has been well developed, its use in planning and scheduling of cranes on construction site has not been fully applied. This gives rise to the need of the present paper which is to develop an optimization method for allocating and scheduling the tower cranes on the construction site so that the materials and energy consumptions can be minimized, which ultimately leads to reduction of carbon emissions. In this paper, a transportation relationship among tower cranes, material supply and demand positions will be established. Then, a model for the multi-tower cranes scheduling will be developed to minimize the consumption of materials and energy without compromising the safety of construction. An example will be provided to demonstrate the developed method.