Scheduling of Construction Projects

This paper deals with some problems of synchronizing construction activities differing in their execution times. A matrix methodology of calculating the times of execution of the activities, ensuring that there will be no collisions between them, is presented. The methodology is illustrated with numerical examples showing the successive steps of the algorithm. As an application we consider road works modeled as a flow shop problem which is one of the most difficult combinatorial problems. A negative times of transports have been used to model a specific constraints of the problem. Tabu search algorithm, one of the best algorithm of the artificial intelligence methods, has been adopted to solve this problem.