Resource-constrained scheduling for construction projects

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Project management and scheduling has been the topic of research for years, yet projects in industry are often completed after the deadline and significantly over budget. There is a large discrepancy between project scheduling in research and in practice. Even more worrying is a significant lack of research into construction project scheduling, an especially challenging field. The focus of this thesis will be project scheduling for construction projects. Advancements in project scheduling in research will make the required advancements in practice possible.Two models will be investigated and compared, one utilising exact procedures and another utilising optimisation. Due to the limitations of exact procedures, this thesis will focus on developing a model capable of the optimisation of project schedules for the construction environment. The framework will be such that the entire solution procedure will utilise optimisation, and the format will allow more advanced objective functions to be utilised.Construction projects are highly volatile. Two objective functions are presented which can lead to an improvement in the robustness of the schedule of the project, and therefore combat the effect of delays on the schedule of a construction project. Both functions are multi-objective and suited specifically to the construction environment. The functions minimise makespan while maximising the total slack, or distributed slack, in the schedule. The multi-objective format allows the relative importance of slack maximisation and makespan minimisation to be specified by the user, something which will be of great value to the construction industry where the robustness of a schedule is particularly important. The distributed slack and makespan function makes use of a risk model, where the importance of different activities having slack can be specified. This increases the likelihood that critical activities will have slack in the final schedule, and will be of great value to project managers.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University