Distributed Coordination of Project Schedule Changes

In the construction industry, projects are becoming increasingly large and complex, involving multiple subcontractors. Traditional centralized coordination techniques used by the general contractors become less effective as subcontractors perform most work and provide their own resources. When subcontractors cannot provide enough resources, they hinder their own performance as well as that of other subcontractors and ultimately the entire project. Thus, construction projects need a new distributed coordination approach wherein all of the concerned subcontractors can reschedule a project dynamically. To enable the distributed coordination framework of project schedule changes, the author developed an agent-based compensatory negotiation methodology, which allows intelligent software agents to simulate negotiations on behalf of their human subcontractors. In addition to this theoretical work, I designed and implemented a prototype to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. Thus, this research formalizes the necessary steps that would help construction project participants to increase the efficiency of their resource use, which in turn will enhance successful completions of whole projects.