| dc.description.abstract | The industry of construction or building is still characterized by low entry barrier, low professional status, and the normal practice of lower-than-budge bidding, the policy allowing the lowest bid to win, and the sway of ganging and lobbying. By its nature as an industry, construction (building) industry is a labor-intensive, traditional industry involving complex jobs that require the investment of high capital of a certain level to produce the products required, and its operation profits, due to the unpredictability of external factors, are often hard to predict beforehand, therefore, making this industry a synonym of high risk. In addition, with the sluggish economy in the last ten years, the profitability for this industry has been very limited, while the awareness of industrial safety and expectancy of project quality are prompting this industry to change its way of business operation in order to minimize the risks and maximize the profitability by certain costs and good on-site (operation) management.
Among the items of cost involved in a construction project, the costs of miscellaneous jobs are seldom evaluated, with these jobs expected to get done as “zero-point jobs”, and yet the notion of “zero-point jobs” is never realized, due to the priority being given to the smooth progression of the whole construction project. To tackle this problem, this study aims to study the ways of personnel hiring for miscellaneous jobs, using integral linear programming as the study framework, in order to establish a set of mathematical optimization modes for personnel assignment, hoping to provide a change to the way personnel are hired in order for the assignment to be evaluated in timely manner and maximize the profitability. This study took the example of a construction project that a construction company is to work on next year in some area, using MS Office Excel to establish the parameter database for the modes in question, while making use of the mathematic programming software of LINGO 7.0 to quickly figure out the optimized modes of personnel assignment as well as the minimum costs required for the budget. The benefits of the programmed optimization modes achieved in this study were then compared with the conventional manual assignment modes currently practiced in the industry. The modes as the result of this study can be applied in the assignment of relevant personnel in construction projects, with slight modifications on the conditions and parameters based on the requirements of specific applications to achieve the optimization of personnel hiring and the minimum cost required, indicating the applicability of using optimization theory in establishing personnel assignment modes, and, therefore, making this achievement worth to be recommended to the industry for wider applications. | en_US |