An efficient method for scheduling construction projects with resource constraints

Abstract In construction scheduling, conflicts can arise when activities require common resources that are available only in limited quantities. To overcome this, while retaining minimum project durations, mathematical techniques have been developed for allocating resources. However, these produce a ‘hard’ inflexible approach to resource-constrained schedules. The authors propose an efficient resource allocation algorithm (LINRES) which offers a more flexible approach. To study its performance, an experiment was conducted on 10 small network examples (6 to 29 activities) and the results were compared with those generated by a total of 32 existing heuristic rules. The results show that the LINRES algorithm outperformed most other heuristic rules, including the widely used MINSLK rule in both single- and multi-resource networks. It also provides a reasonable trade-off between the resource-aggregation profiles and the durations.