English Abstract
Abstract:
Nowadays, globalization and growing competition in construction industry have created increasing challenges for project managers to deliver their projects on time and within allocated budget. The success of a construction project depends on scheduling, cost effectiveness and how firmly the project can be controlled. Inappropriate scheduling leads tocompletion delays and cost overruns.
The main aim of this thesis is to develop and use a scheduling and cost optimization model to overcome the challenging and competitive environment in school building construction in the public sector. Two well-established local contractors are selected to investigate their school construction scheduling practice for two school buildings in the Ministry of Works, Municipality Affairs and Urban Planning (MoWMAUP) in Bahrain. As a result, a new school scheduling model (SSM) has been developed which involves the following: 1) The logical relationships within each floor (horizontal constraints) and among the different floors (vertical constraints); 2) The vertical link between the structural core activities which have repetitive nature; 3) Work continuity and crew synchronization; 4) productivity factors and learning curve theory; and 5) Pre-determined deadline, work interruptions, and resource constraints.
Moreover, genetic algorithms technique (GA) is used along with SSM to reduce construction cost. GA is a unique optimization technique that is useful to examine an optimum or near optimum solution for any complicated problems consisting of large number of variables such as school buildings.
Optimization is used to select construction methods, number of crews, and works interruptions for each activity that results in an optimum schedule with minimum total construction cost. Furthermore, SSM illustrates graphical reports of the large schedule data to assist crew and project control throughout construction.The application of SSM functions require a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro that uses the language of Microsoft Project software. Later, a case study is carried out on school building construction in Bahrain to examine and prove its suitability. The consistency and suitability of SSM to the school building environment is proven through various optimization experiments.
