Partnership of contractors in cooperative game theory approach to project resource management

Abstract

It is accepted that project breakdown into several independent subprojects can help to have a successful and effective project management. On the other hand, it can lead to inefficiently use of some renewable resources, and increase the total project cost and time. This article studies the benefits of the horizontal partnering among contractors assigned to subprojects through the sharing renewable resources and proposes a model based on cooperative game theory to solve it. The improvement of the net present value of the project is considered as the benefit of the cooperation among contractors. Therefore, a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model is developed for the resource constrained project scheduling with objective function of maximizing the net present value (NPV) of each coalition. Seven widely used cooperative game theory solution methods are used to solve the benefit (NPV) allocation problem and then the stability criteria are suggested to find the best allocation scheme. Finally, an example is represented to more comprehensively illustrate the problem.