NIDE: A Novel Improved Differential Evolution for Construction Project Crashing Optimization

In the field of construction management, project crashing is an approach to shortening the project duration by reducing the duration of several critical project activities to less than their normal activity duration. The goal of crashing is to shorten the project duration while minimizing the crashing cost. In this research, a novel method for construction project crashing is proposed. The method is named as novel improved differential evolution (NIDE). The proposed NIDE is developed by an integration of the differential evolution (DE) and a new probabilistic similarity-based selection operator (PSSO) that aims at improving the DE’s selection process. The PSSO has the role as a scheme for preserving the population diversity and fending off the premature convergence. The experimental result has demonstrated that the newly established NIDE can successfully escape from local optima and achieve a significantly better optimization performance