A Survey on Integration of Optimization and Project Management Tools for Sustainable Construction Scheduling

Abstract

Construction scheduling, in practice, commonly relies on the usage of commercial project management tools (PMT) without specific optimization features. To obtain optimal schedules, planners often need to develop separate optimization models with special tools, which, however, demand further processing and editing of optimization results by PMT into forms expected for project management. In this regard, separation of optimization and PMT also requires considerable additional work for complete and harmonized updating of schedules during construction execution. Mentioned drawbacks and lack of available time may take to deficient construction scheduling during the implementation phase resulting in poor or even insufficient realization of project goals. Therefore, this paper presents an achievements survey on the integration of optimization and PMT that allow sustainable construction scheduling, particularly in terms of continuous optimal time and resource allocation throughout the project life cycle. Such work has not yet been comprehensively done up to now and the present contribution intends to fill a literature gap in the aforesaid area. Following a brief introduction, the optimization platform for construction scheduling is given in the article. Focusing on construction scheduling, an in-depth achievements survey on the integration of heuristics methods, mathematical programming and special solving methods with conventional PMT as well as optimization-based building information modeling (BIM) tools is then performed and findings are reported. The paper ends with conclusions and recommendations for further research.

Preferences of Construction Managers Regarding the Quality and Optimization Criteria of Project Schedules

“…Sustainable realization of the construction process of a building object is largely related to properly developed and realized schedules and planning/selection of working methods (technologies, organisational methods). Sustainable schedules are not only about delivering results according to objectives (cost, time or resource consumption), but also include decisions that should be sustainable in the long term [2,3]. This is all the more difficult since the implementation of construction projects is a complex issue and is exposed to numerous risk factors, such as: dependence on the influence of weather conditions, individual nature of each construction site, real estate of construction products (during construction realization resources are transferred to the subsequent work stations as compared to an industrial plant, where the processed product is moved to subsequent workstations), significant scattering of structures in the field (scattering of objects in the field makes it difficult to organize works and increases the scope of transport works), late achievement of effects resulting from the construction of objects, significant dimensions and large mass of elements and construction objects, long period of use of construction objects, random nature of construction process realization time, internal and external supply problems, failure of machinery and equipment used [4][5][6][7][8].…”

“…[1] as well as being a large labour market; it involves significant human resources. Sustainable development refers to the whole life cycle of a building from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation and deconstruction [2].…”

Proactive and reactive approach to employee competence configuration problem in planning and scheduling processes

“…The proposed implementation methods turned out to be more effective and flexible than the methods of mathematical programming usually applied to such problems [5,9,18]. This concerned both the hybrid approach (Section 4.1) and the dedicated genetic algorithm (Section 4.2) developed by the authors.…”

“…For question Q 2 , the objective function ( 9) determines the minimum number of new competences that the employees must accomplish. For other questions, the objective function may have a slightly different form than (9).…”

Resilient Scheduling as a Response to Uncertainty in Construction Projects

“…Current practices in the domain of construction planning and scheduling are oriented towards automatic schedule development and the application of specialized optimization techniques [15]. Although modern technologies such as BIM have already been applied to the optimization problems in the realm of construction scheduling [16][17][18][19][20][21], additional development and possible extensions are still needed to effectively automatize scheduling practices and improve both customizability and user-friendliness of emerging technologies for practical use [22,23].…”