Flexible Resource-constrained Discrete Time-cost Trade-off Problem Considering Resource Transfer

With the acceleration of global infrastructure construction in recent years, numerous repetitive construction projects are under planning or construction. Resources need to be transferred between units in the construction process. This transfer will lead to a large amount of time and cost consumption, and the existing research on discrete time-cost trade-off problem (DTCTP) of repetitive projects has paid little attention to this issue. This paper introduces an improved resource transfer scheme (DTCTP-rt) considering calculable resource transfer costs, and the calculation results show that this method can obtain a more practical solution. After introducing resource transfer, resource demands conflicts between units become more intense. In order to address this problem, the concept of flexible resource constraint (FRC) is introduced to form FRCDTCTP-rt. The resource constraint is no longer regarded as a fixed constant, but allowed to float arbitrarily in an interval. The calculation results show that considering FRC provides managers with more and better feasible choices.