A new approach to time-cost-quality tradeoff problem for construction project

The final quality is crucial for construction project, and its level determines the probability of the quality accident; moreover, the repair work occurs frequently due to the quality at a certain time during construction; besides, quality is acknowledged to be an important component of project management, but its joint relationship with time and cost previously has not been modeled. Therefore, a non-linear stochastic programming model is constructed based on multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem(MRCPSP) to minimize total quality cost which is composed of prevention cost and failure cost; the binary normal distribution is adopted to describe the relation among duration, direct cost and quality of each activity; two indicators namely cumulative quality and project quality are employed to measure the level during construction and the ultimate level respectively. Furthermore, the shuffled flog-leaping algorithm is adapted to solve the discrete tradeoff problem based on an adaptive serial schedule generation scheme. Finally, an example is provided to examine the algorithm performance.