Stability Measure for Prefab Balancing in Prefabrication Construction Supply Chain Management

Abstract: Prefabrication construction supply chain management measures comprise tactical operating procedures to minimize costs and strategically allocate the resources such as prefab and construction materials. However, current practices in prefab allocation depend mainly on foreman experience, resulting in unpunctual delivery and insufficient resource allocation. As a costly component, the storage and distribution of prefabs have received considerable attention. The new challenges derive from coordinating the punctual transportation of prefabs and cost control. Existing literature rarely investigates the resource allocation in prefabrication construction supply chain management. This research presents a prefab resource allocation model with a penalty mechanism to balance the stability of prefabrication construction supply chain management. Several aspects of practical relevance are considered, such as penalty of unpunctual delivery, limitation of storage area in the construction site, and multiple prefab types and transportation routes. In this research, CPLEX is used for solving this mixed integer linear programming model on a small scale. A PSO based on CPLEX is proposed to solve the large-scale instances with a penalty mechanism. In the future, we plan to forecast the resource demand based on the real-world data shared by a construction company, and to analyze the allocation of construction materials in our model under demand uncertainty.