Artificial Bee Colony Application in Cost Optimization of Project Schedules in Construction

Artificial bee colony (ABC) simulates the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees. ABC consists of three types of bees: employed, onlooker, and scout. Employed bees perform exploration and onlooker bees perform exploitation, whereas scout bees are responsible for randomly searching the food source in the feasible region. Being simple and having fewer control parameters, ABC has been widely used to solve complex multifaceted optimization problems. This study presents an application of ABC in optimizing the cost of project schedules in construction. As we know that project schedules consist of number of activities (predecessor and successor), variable cost is involved in accomplishing these activities. Therefore, scheduling these activities in terms of optimizing resources or cost-effective scheduling becomes a tedious task. The computational result demonstrates the efficacy of ABC.