Multi-resource trade-off problem of the project contractors in a cooperative environment: highway construction case study

Large-scale projects often have several activities which are performed by some contractors having multiple resources such as human resources, budget, equipment, etc. Time and multi-resources trade-off are important factors for the contractors and the client. In real large projects, the contractors cooperate with each other and form coalitions to improve the project profit and/or to reduce the project time, which is reasonable. The purpose of this paper is to address the challenges of time and multi-resources management during the contractors’ cooperation. This study presents a model based on cooperative game theory for project time/multi-resource trade-off problems. A numerical example is presented for the comprehensive investigation of the problem and the cooperative techniques of game theory. Results of the proposed model demonstrate that the contractors can obtain higher profits due to cooperating through sharing resources. Moreover, it is found that techniques such as the Shapley value, the max–min core, and the equal profit method are able to assign the extra cooperation profit fairly among the contractors.