In construction projects, time, cost and quality are three factors playing an important role in the planning and control. Most of previous researches primarily focused on the two factors of time and cost with little or no reported research focusing on models for optimizing construction time, cost, and quality jointly. Obviously, project quality is a vital contributor to the reputation of a company. Recently Government agencies have commenced using new types of contracting methods which have put bigger pressure on decision makers in the construction industry to look for optimal/near optimal resource utilization planning that requires to minimize construction cost and time while meeting/maximizing the requirement of quality. In this study, a novel optimization model, named as Advanced Constraint Handling Differential Evolution (ACH-DE), is applied which enables minimizing project cost while meeting specific quality output standards and requirement of desired time. Not similar to the popular approach, the proposed approach does not require any penalty parameter for penalty function. The power of the optimization model has been demonstrated by experimental results compared to other models. Thus the proposed optimization model is a promising and useful tool for project managers to solve optimization problems in construction.

In construction projects, time, cost and quality are three factors playing an important role in the planning and control. Most of previous researches primarily focused on the two factors of time and cost with little or no reported research focusing on models for optimizing construction time, cost, and quality jointly. Obviously, project quality is a vital contributor to the reputation of a company. Recently Government agencies have commenced using new types of contracting methods which have put bigger pressure on decision makers in the construction industry to look for optimal/near optimal resource utilization planning that requires to minimize construction cost and time while meeting/maximizing the requirement of quality. In this study, a novel optimization model, named as Advanced Constraint Handling Differential Evolution (ACH-DE), is applied which enables minimizing project cost while meeting specific quality output standards and requirement of desired time. Not similar to the popular approach, the proposed approach does not require any penalty parameter for penalty function. The power of the optimization model has been demonstrated by experimental results compared to other models. Thus the proposed optimization model is a promising and useful tool for project managers to solve optimization problems in construction.

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