Time-cost trade-off of construction project based on ant colony algorithm

The time-cost trade-off is one of the most crucial aspects of construction project planning, which in fact is a multi-objective optimization problem. A new evolutionary algorithm-ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm was employed to solve the time-cost trade-off problem (TCTP). Combining with the modified adaptive weight approach (MAWA), the ACO algorithm can find out the optimal solution, and define the Pareto front as well. To verify the efficiency and performance of the proposed method, a test example was conducted and the results were compared with that of the exhaustive enumeration and the genetic algorithm. The results indicate that the ACO algorithm is much suitable for solving time-cost trade-off problem.