Abstract
In construction industry, general contractors (GCs) need to manage and conduct numerous projects simultaneously. To this aim, they usually have subcontractors conduct available tasks and projects. So, subcontractor management is becoming a major challenge. To deal with this challenge, GCs aim to reduce total costs of projects including employment/subcontracting costs, indirect costs, tardiness penalties, and the money which must be paid for movement of workforce from one project to another. The aim of current research study is to propose a model for selecting subcontractors and assigning available tasks in the project to them in order to reduce the costs of the GC. Then, a genetic algorithm is proposed to solve a real problem. The proposed algorithm is innovative from three points of view: (1) generation of initial population; (2) subcontractor assignment approach; and (3) the objective function. The problem was also solved by means of an exact method. Then, the results of proposed algorithm were compared to the outcomes of the exact method. This comparison shows that the proposed algorithm can efficiently help GCs select subcontractors and assign available tasks to each subcontractor when several projects must be carried out simultaneously.
Highlights
One of the initial steps in project planning is to identify the right subcontractors and assign the available work packages of a project to them
General contractor (GCs) usually have limited information about real cost and duration of a project because these parameters depend on capabilities of the subcontractors who carry out the work packages of the project
Recent research studies show that a significant proportion of them did not consider the impact of subcontractor selection on overall features of the project including project duration, cost, and feasibility
Summary
One of the initial steps in project planning is to identify the right subcontractors and assign the available work packages of a project to them. Recent research studies show that a significant proportion of them did not consider the impact of subcontractor selection on overall features of the project including project duration, cost, and feasibility. To make the problem more realistic, it is necessary to consider the condition in which the GCs need to conduct numerous projects at the same time Taking these realistic situations in consideration makes the model and the formulation more complicated. To deal with these realistic problems, Afshar et al (2020) investigated the problem of subcontractor selection when the GC must conduct numerous projects at the same time.
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