Project Delivery System Selection : The Role of Overlapping Strategy

The continuous evolution to project delivery systems (PDSs) in recent years has posed a conundrum to practitioners on how to choose the appropriate PDS for a construction project. This study tries to solve this challenge from the perspective of the role of overlapping strategy. Through the analysis of the relationship between activities of the construction project, an optimal schedule of PDS should have a balance between overlapping and rework. To achieve this aim, this study develops a multiple overlapping modes resource-constrained project scheduling problem with generalized precedence relations (MOM-RCPSP-GPR) model. This model generalizes the traditional precedence constraints between activities and extends the search space for better resource usage compared to the current overlap literature. To address these provocative changes, this study further adopts an innovated hybrid methods based on heuristics and genetic algorithms. Computational experiments and a case study are respectively conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework and its application in practice. The results show that the proposed model can better reflect the overlapping role compared to existing research and the adopted hybrid approach can effectively solve such a model. Hence, this study contributes to the literature on overlapping and PDS selection and has strong practical applicability