Crashing construction project schedules by relocating resources

A variety of schedule compression techniques are used to get delayed construction projects “back on tracks”. This paper presents a new optimization approach to schedule crashing by relocating some of the workers from non-critical to critical processes (changing composition of crews using the initial pool of workers) and employing additional resources. The authors describe their idea in the form of a mixed-integer linear problem. A numerical example illustrates the merits of the proposed approach. The method may become a practical support in construction scheduling decisions.