تاريخ مجلس الدراسات العليا

2021-07-28

اسم الطالب

اسامة عدنان محمود نصرالله

ملخص الرسالة

The scheduling and leveling based on performance indices are proposed in this thesis using a heuristic method. Managing resources is essential in project management and has a direct effect on the cost of construction projects. The simple Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) and Critical Path Method (CPM) approaches are widely used for scheduling construction projects. Due to the nature of these methods of non-fixed project time and unlimited resources, project managers and researchers strive to use algorithms to achieve optimal scheduling and resource managing in practical considerations. Resource leveling in construction projects is mainly concerned with the reduction of peaks and valleys of daily resource requirements. Heuristic indices have many uses in project management, like testing the efficiency of a schedule created by an optimization technique. Resource moment about the x-axis (M_x), resource moment on the y axis (M_y), rate of resource usage (RR), resource improvement coefficient (RIC), and the maximum value of the used resource (V_m) are among the most widely used indices and will be considered in this thesis. The purposes of this thesis are first, make indices clear for contractors, engineers, managers, and all Jordanian construction field stakeholders, get feedbacks from Jordanian construction field workers by interviews about the importance of these indices in terms of importance weight, and finally, optimization using multiple criteria on a case study in Jordan to obtain the scheduling scheme that provides optimality or near optimality which is the main goal of this research. The five major heuristic indices differ in importance, so a questionnaire was constructed and sent to project management professionals with a comprehensive explanation of the concept of the indices to collect data that can be used in conducting the importance weights of them. Sixty-seven participants returned the questionnaire fully answered, and the data collected was analyzed using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The result was that V_m had the highest weight value, then M_x, M_y, RR, and RIC, respectively. The weights were used in a linear combination of the five indices to leveling and scheduling a case study in Jordan, and another case study from literature with a heuristic method, the resources are converted to costs in both case studies. However, to enhance the heuristic method, since heuristic methods do not provide a near-optimal solution, some parameters were changed in order to obtain better results. In addition, multiple combinations of weights were tested on the case study and were tested on a case study taken from a thesis done in one of the universities in Jordan. The major finding is that the proposed method provided a suboptimal schedule, and indices performance varies depending on the project and its nature of resources and activities distributions. The parameter used was a part of the total float of the noncritical activities; changing this parameter value changes the way the heuristic shifts the activities through their total float. After testing multiple values of the parameter, it is noticed that the best resource profile is obtained in the same value of when changing indices weights for the same project. The best schedule was not obtained with the weights conducted from the data collected, and that may be because the indices still need more justification for the professionals in Jordan.