In the construction industry, projects are becoming increasingly
large and complex, necessitating multiple subcontractors. Traditional
centralized coordination techniques used by general contractors become
insufficient as subcontractors perform most work and provide their own
resources. When subcontractors cannot provide enough resources, they
hinder their own performance, that of other subcontractors, and
ultimately the entire project. Thus, projects need a new distributed
coordination approach wherein all of the concerned subcontractors can
respond to changes and reschedule a project dynamically. This paper
presents a new distributed coordination framework for project schedule
changes (DCPSC) that is based on an agent-based negotiation approach
wherein software agents evaluate the impact of changes, simulate
decisions, and give advice on behalf of the human subcontractors. A
case example demonstrates the significance of the DCPSC. It compares
two centralized coordination methodologies used in current practice to
the DCPSC framework. We demonstrate that our DCPSC framework always
finds a solution that is better than or equal to any of two centralized
coordination methodologies.