Resource levelling in repetitive construction projects with interruptions: an integrated approach

Abstract

Despite the significance of resource levelling, project managers lack various ways to smooth resource usage fluctuation of a repetitive construction project besides changing resource usage. Tolerating interruptions is an effective way to provide flexibility for a schedule but is ignored when solving resource levelling problems. Therefore, this paper investigates the impacts of interruptions on resource usage fluctuation and develops an integrated approach that simultaneously integrates two scheduling adjusting processes: changing resource usage and tolerating interruptions. In this paper, two interruption conditions are proposed to identify which activities are suitable to be interrupted for smoothing resource usage fluctuation. The traditional resource levelling model is modified to a new scheduling model by incorporating interruptions. A two-stage GA-based scheduling algorithm is developed by integrating changing resource usage and tolerating interruptions. A commonly used pipeline project is adopted to illustrate the steps of the proposed approach and demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority through comparison with previous studies. A large-scale project further verifies the usability of the proposed approach. The results confirmed the feasibility to smooth resource usage fluctuation by interruptions, and the integrated approach can achieve a more competitive resource levelling result.

Keywords

• construction management
• repetitive construction project
• scheduling
• resource levelling
• work interruption
• optimization