Cost-safety trade-off in unequal-area construction site layout planning

Cost and safety are two key elements when designing a good construction site layout planning (CSLP). Previous research works always considered CSLP from the aspect of reducing cost and treated SCLPasasingle objective optimization problem. In the paper, CSLP was designed by a multi-objective optimization (MOO) model using modified Pareto-based ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm, which could find a Pareto solution (trade-off layout) to fulfill the requirement of reducing cost and improve the site safety level simultaneously. Furthermore, in order to apply MOO model to solve unequal-area problem, the random grids-recognition strategy was employed in the proposed MOO model to solve the unequal-area site layout problems without increasing the computational complexities. A case study of a residential building project isused tovalidate the proposed MOO model and the results are very positive. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.