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

Abstract

It is generally agreed that decomposing a project into several independent subprojects can help to have a successful and effective project management. On the other hand, this may lead to inefficient use of some renewable resources and increase in the total cost and time of project. This study deals with the benefits of horizontal partnering among contractors assigned to subprojects through sharing renewable resources and proposes a model based on cooperative game theory for the problem. The improvement of the Net Present Value (NPV) of the project was considered as the benefit of cooperation among contractors. Therefore, a Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) model was developed for the resource constrained project scheduling with the objective function of maximizing the NPV of each coalition. Seven widely used cooperative game theory solution methods were used to solve the NPV allocation problem and then, stability criteria were utilized to find the best allocation scheme. An example is presented in the paper to more comprehensively illustrate the problem.