Construction time–cost–resources–quality trade-off optimization using NSGA-III

For successful completion of construction project, achieving the project in minimum duration (time) and budget (cost) are oldest and of paramount importance objectives. But due to advancement in technologies and increasing requirements of project’s stakeholders/participants, there may be requirement of fulfilling more competing and conflicting objectives, such as reduction in amount of resource utilization and maximizing the project’s quality as well as minimizing the time and cost of project. Literature study shows numerous many-objective scheduling models (MOSMs) with several complexities and limitations. But due to increment in competing and conflicting objectives, such MOSM models are required which overcome the limitations and complexities of existing MOSM models. Therefore, this study introduces a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (NSGA-III)-based MOSM for the simultaneous optimization of time, cost, resources and quality. To demonstrate the working of proposed MOSM, it is practically implemented on a real construction project and a Pareto-optimal set of solution is obtained. Results of case study indicate the effectiveness of proposed MOSM in simultaneous optimization of four objectives. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.