PROJECT SCHEDULING BY A HEURISTIC ALGORITHM UNDER LIMITED RESOURCE IN THE CONSTRUCTION INVESTMENTS

Öz

A proper use of the resources has become the prime target of the economy circles nowadays. In this connection, an optimal use of the resources in the construction industry is of a great importance. In a construction project, a vast number of processes are involved and each of them requires many different resources, namely, labor, machinery, materials, finance, etc. The size of the construction projects is relatively large and these projects are fairly complicated. One should not think that the resources are to be available at the desired time and at a prescribed amount during the process of the implementation of the project. Therefore, use of the resources also needs a stage of planning. These projects can conveniently programmed by the so-called resource constrained project scheduling techniques. In this work, an algorithm based on a heuristic approach with priority rules was developed in the Visual Basic language and tested on a project applied to the construction of building for primary school in Turkey. The project comprises 79 activities each involving 11 differentresources. Different programs for the cases of constrained and unconstrained resources were developed. The overall period it takes the project to be completed was found to be 226 days for the case of unconstrained resources and 260 days for the case of under constrained resources.