Renovation scheduling to minimize user impact of a building that remains in operation

When renovating a building that remains in operation, the closure of some areas is inevitable. If a corridor needs to be closed off, the accessibility of rooms may be affected. To minimize the numbers of rooms that need to be closed, contractors usually construct temporary passageways. Because temporary passageways are narrow, they often have a user impact, including time delay. This impact needs to be quantified and improved through work zone scheduling. This paper proposed an integrated model that calculates the amount of pedestrian time delay through simulation and searches for the near-optimal schedule using ant colony optimization. The model is applied to the scheduling of a floor tile renovation project of a building that remains in operation. The finding indicates that the model reduces the pedestrian time delay to a much greater extent compared to the schedule proposed by human planners based on the location sequence of work zones.