WORKERS FLOW AND ON-TIME COMPLETION OF CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

Abstract

The construction sector is one of the most important economic activities since it is responsible for planning, designing, and developing the infrastructure that social development requires, such as roads, schools, and hospitals. Thus, the late completion of construction projects may harm social welfare. Construction companies have problems coping with completion times since they simultaneously manage multiple infrastructure projects that differ in the number of workers they need and the possibility of having projects whose development overlaps. So, companies split their projects into development stages to simplify the management of construction projects, which require an efficient allocation of workers to cope with the stages’ activities. This paper analyzes the distribution of workers among development stages to cope with the projects’ completion times. Noticing that not all workers should participate in the same development stage of a single project, the previous problem casts similarities with the maximum flow problem. We follow this modeling approach to determine the number of workers participating at each development stage when a company simultaneously manages more than one construction project. Later, we apply the previous model for a company that operates 11 projects and has 24 workers; the maximum workers’ flow model sets the number of workers that each development stage needs for the on-time completion of the 11 projects by considering three different scenarios, concerning the overlapping of development stages.