Theory And Methodology Of Construction Project Resource Allocation Optimization

As the core of organization and management for construction projects, resource allocation optimization would affect the efficiency and success of construction process significantly. Hence, it is an important research subject in construction industry to develop the theory of construction project resource allocation optimization, and further apply the theory to the real projects.The theory of construction project resource allocation optimization was re-constructed in this dissertation by using the basic theory of technological economics—theory of six forces on essential factors of production. Based on this theory, the mathematics formulation and ACO-based solution procedure of construction project resource allocation optimization were developed. With a computational experiment on PSPLIB test problems, the influence of problem parameters on the performance of the proposed solution procedure and that of the construction project resource allocation optimization were also analyzed. The main innovations of this dissertation are listed as follows.1. The theory of construction project resource allocation optimization based on the theory of six forces on essential factors of production was presented in this dissertation. In this theory, the concept of resources for construction process was re-defined as six categories which include labor, capital, material, nature, fright and time. The characteristics of these resources were included in six principles of construction resource. Furthermore, construction project resource allocation optimization was defined as a process of allocation of the six categories of resources to maximize the economic efficiency index of construction project, with the restriction on precedence relations and resource availability. This theory also used the economic efficiency index as evaluation criterion for construction project resource allocation optimization.2. The mathematics formulation of construction project resource allocation optimization based on the theory of six forces on essential factors of production was constructed in this study. This formulation employed resource allocation modes of construction project as the decision-making variables, and utilized the economic efficiency index as the objective. Furthermore, this formulation defined the concept of resource allocation mode, i.e. it is a combination of activities performing modes and schedule. Based on this definition, the process of resource allocation was divided into two stages. At the first stage, the resources except time were allocated to determine the combination of activities performing modes; while at the second stage, the time resource was allocated to obtain the schedule. Thus, the basic principle for solving the construction project resource allocation optimization problem was established.3. The ACO-based solution procedure for construction project resource allocation optimization was also developed in this research. The basic search idea for this procedure is the concept of three-dimensional decision-making space. The procedure generated the order of resource allocation and schedule by bi-direction planning method, and determined the combination of activities performing modes by a branch-and-bound procedure. A local optimization procedure was designed for the feasible schedule generated above, and the probability and method for searching optimal solution were obtained from ACO. The results of computational experiment indicated that the presented solution procedure in this dissertation will obtain satisfied solution in reasonable time for the project with greater non-renewable resource strength.