A goal programming approach to allocate communication benefits among construction project teams

Communications is a key factor to a construction project's success. In order to improve productivity of construction, communications should be studied. Data obtained in a survey conducted by the author show that distrust caused by interest conflicts among project participants is the root of bad project communications in China. Based on the analysis of classical solutions for cooperative N-person games, this paper presents a goal programming approach to allocate the communication benefits among the participants. Compared with classical solutions, the solution obtained from this approach is more reasonable so that construction projects participants could be stimulated to make more efforts to improve project communications. Compared with other communication benefits allocation solutions, the solution proposed is more consistent with practice, and thus project communications can be improved.