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Öz, Ö (2001) Sources of competitive advantage of Turkish construction companies in international markets. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 135-44.

Han, S S and Ofori, G (2001) Construction industry in China's regional economy, 1990-1998. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 189-205.

Lam, K C, Hu, T, Ng, S T, Skitmore, M R and Cheung, S O (2001) A fuzzy neural network approach for contractor prequalification. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 175-88.

Lingard, H and Holmes, N (2001) Understandings of occupational health and safety risk control in small business construction firms: barriers to implementing technological controls. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 217-26.

Ng, S T, Mak, M M Y, Skitmore, M R, Lam, K C and Varnam, M (2001) The predictive ability of Bromilow's time-cost model. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 165-73.

Ofori, G and Lean, C S (2001) Factors influencing development of construction enterprises in Singapore. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 145-54.

Raftery, J, Csete, J and Hui, S K-F (2001) Are risk attitudes robust? Qualitative evidence before and after a business cycle inflection. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 155-64.

Sözen, Z and Kayahan, O (2001) Correlates of the length of the relationship between main and specialist trade contractors in the construction industry. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 131-3.

Sawhney, A and Mund, A (2001) IntelliCranes: an integrated crane type and model selection system. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 227-37.

Tam, C M, Tong, T K L, Cheung, S O and Chan, A P C (2001) Genetic algorithm model in optimizing the use of labour. Construction Management and Economics, 19(02), 207-15.

  • Type: Journal Article
  • Keywords: genetic algorithms; labour deployment; multi-skill; subcontracting;
  • ISBN/ISSN: 0144-6193
  • URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/01446190150505126
  • Abstract:

    The construction industry is characterized by the existence of multiple trades and crafts. With the existence of multiple-tiers of labour-only-subcontracting in Hong Kong, tradesmen are normally assigned to tasks of a narrowly defined skill. Lately, there has been a call for the adoption of a directly employed labour scheme by the Hong Kong Housing Authority and the public works departments in Hong Kong in order to improve both safety and quality. However, current industry practice has hindered the adoption of directly employed labour, which requires assigning tradesmen to broadly defined task groupings. In implementing the scheme, the first thing to be resolved is how to maximize the levels of use of workers, because that is the major financial incentive to encourage contractors to adopt the directly employed labour policy. This coupled with the shortage of some skilled craft workers call into question the traditionally accepted ’single-skilled’ or ’single-task’ approach in labour deployment. A genetic algorithm model is developed to optimize the labour deployment and practical examples are presented. The optimization results are very promising, confirming the practical application value of the model.