Aminbakhsh, SamanSonmez, RifatAminbakhsh, SamanAtan, TankutCivil Engineering2024-07-052024-07-052020140733-93641943-786210.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001870https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001870https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14411/3061Atan, Tankut/0000-0002-3241-4617; Sonmez, Rifat/0000-0001-6163-3264; Aminbakhsh, Saman/0000-0002-4389-1910Despite intensive research efforts that have been devoted to discrete time-cost optimization of construction projects, the current methods have very limited capabilities for solving the problem for real-life-sized projects. This study presents a new activity uncrashing heuristic with noncritical activity rescheduling method to narrow the gap between the research and practice for time-cost optimization. The uncrashing heuristic searches for new solutions by uncrashing the critical activities with the highest cost-slope. This novel feature of the proposed heuristic enables identification and elimination of the dominated solutions during the search procedure. Hence, the heuristic can determine new high-quality solutions based on the nondominated solutions. Furthermore, the proposed noncritical activity rescheduling method of the heuristic decreases the amount of scheduling calculations, and high-quality solutions are achieved within a short CPU time. Results of the computational experiments reveal that the new heuristic outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly for large-scale single-objective cost minimization and Pareto front optimization problems. Hence, the primary contribution of the paper is a new heuristic method that can successfully achieve high-quality solutions for large-scale discrete time-cost optimization problems.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccessSchedulingOptimizationAlgorithmsMultiple objective analysisProject managementArticle1468WOS:000542675500003