Optimized scheduling for highway construction

In the last few years, many transportation agencies across North America have started to adopt new contracting methods for highway construction that provide contractors with financial incentives to reduce construction time. This includes bidding on cost/time and contracting employing incentive/disincentive clauses. As a result, highway contractors are under a growing pressure to optimize their schedule to minimize both project time and cost. This paper presents a computerized model for optimized scheduling of highway projects that can be applied to any of the above two contracting methods. The model uses dynamic programming and establishes a balance between project time reduction and its associated additional costs. For each activity in the project, the model identifies the optimum resource usage from a set of available alternatives. This provides an optimum resource-use strategy and an optimum schedule for delivering highway construction projects, ensuring minimum project total cost and maximum profit to contractors.