| dc.description.abstract | With the government’s financial difficulties and a lower demand of public construction works, the engineering consultants and architect offices in Taiwan are facing a keen competition for survival. The key factor for their success lies in the enhancement of their competition abilities. Therefore, how to make use of the available human resources, and to assign responsibilities with a view to carry out the project in a quick, effective and cost-saving manner within the expected time and level of quality have become an important issue for policy-makers of inspection for construction projects. From our observations, numerous decision-makers use methods from their own personal experiences when it comes to determining human resource assignments. This may be effective in a simple project, but in a more complicated project, which may require more extensive experience in inspection, how to avoid wasting human resources while meeting the contractual requirements of time and quality is a critical issue which a decision-maker has to face.
In this study, an integer programming method based on the concept of contractual-requirement orientation has been established for assigning human resources for large- and medium-sized inspection projects. In actual performance, the human resource assignment model can be re-arranged based on the adjusted criteria corresponding to the new conditions. According to the sensibility analysis in this study, a project decision-maker can adjust the human resource arrangements based on the sensibility factors, and after reviewing the restriction conditions, can even partially adjust the contracted progress schedule to achieve a better usage of the available human resources, which in turn helps attain the objective of cost-saving. The model in this study is found to be more suitable for large- and medium-sized inspection projects and assists decision-makers in resolving any problems related to human resource assignments.
For finding solutions, this model first quantifies the work load based on the terms and conditions of the respective contract, then analyzes the assignments of engineers according to the restrictions provided in the contract, and finally, based on the number of engineers, analyzes the corresponding requirements for secretaries, operation costs, and regulatory costs. According to this data, the mathematical formulation is established and fed into the LINGO 8.0 software to find the optimal human resource assignment with a minimum inspection cost. By simulating an independent supervision project in which several contracts are executed, this study tests and compares the differences between the model’s result and the manual assignment performed in current practice. The results are satisfactory and prove that the proposed model is useful for human resource assignments. | en_US |