Abstract
The simultaneous reduction of the project cost and time has paramount importance in today's competitive world; however, it is necessary to balance the project time and cost because of the reduction asymmetry of the two factors in a project. How to balance the cost and time parameters in managing construction projects is also critical and there have always been some attempts made to provide different approaches to control it. Given the immense importance of considering resource constraints for project scheduling problems, and the proximity of the study conditions to the real world, resource constraints were also included. In a project, project managers need to be aware of resource constraints. As resource constraint scheduling problem is considered NP-hard, the metaheuristic models were developed in this paper in order to obtain results contributing to project managers’ decision-making. For this purpose, a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm method was developed to optimize a time-cost trade-off problem. Furthermore, to solve a multi-project scheduling problem, the critical chain method was used. In order to evaluate the performance of the model, the developed model was first studied in a small scale and then simultaneous projects with 7, 8 and 10 tasks were planned. Because resource availability is essential in such problems, after solving the proposed model, a sensitivity analysis was performed for daily resources and the results were discussed. Results shows the ability of the proposed model and methodology to optimize the time-cost tradeoff considering resource constraints in sample problems. Solutions obtained showed that in some cases of scheduling without this algorithm, resource consumption exceeded above resource availability. After solving the model by proposed algorithm, resource allocation is implemented considering resource constraint. This model determined these resources as crucial and helped managers to control them.
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Taheri Amiri, M.J., Haghighi, F., Eshtehardian, E. et al. Multi-project Time-cost Optimization in Critical Chain with Resource Constraints. KSCE J Civ Eng 22, 3738–3752 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12205-017-0691-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12205-017-0691-x