MULTI-SITE CONSTRUCTION PROJECT SCHEDULING CONSIDERING RESOURCE MOVING TIME IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Under the booming construction demands in developing countries, particularly in Vietnam situation, construction contractors often perform multiple concurrent projects in different places. In construction project scheduling processes, the existing scheduling methods often assume the resource moving time between activities/projects to be negligible. When multiple projects are deployed in different places and far from each other, this assumption has many shortcomings for properly modelling the real-world constraints. Especially, with respect to developing countries such as the Vietnam which contains transportation systems that are still in backward and low technical standards. This paper proposes a new algorithm named Multi-Site Construction Project Scheduling - MCOPS. The objective of this algorithm is to solve the problem of minimising multi-site construction project duration under limited available conditions of renewable resources (labour, machines and equipment) combining with the moving time of required resource among activities/projects. Additionally, in order to mitigate the impact of resource moving time into the multi-site project duration, this paper proposed a new priority rule: Minimum Resource Moving Time (MinRMT). The MinRMT is applied to rank the finished activities according to a priority order, to support the released resources to the scheduling activities. In order to investigate the impact of the resource moving time among activities during the scheduling process, computational experimentation was implemented. The results of the MCOPS-based computational experiments showed that, the resource moving time among projects has significantly impacted the multi-site project durations and this amount of time can not be ignored in the multi-site project scheduling process. Besides, the efficient application of the MinRMT is also demonstrated through the achieved results of the computational experiment in this paper. Though the efforts in this paper are based on the Vietnamese construction conditions, the proposed method can be usefully applied in other developing countries which have similar construction conditions