Multi-building, multi-story prefabricated construction projects are notably characterized by high complexity and repetitiveness, which necessitate efficient resource scheduling. Traditional resource-constrained project scheduling problems primarily address global resources, whereas existing studies on repetitive scheduling emphasize crew allocation and often neglect constraints associated with spatially localized resources, such as tower cranes. To address the challenges posed by repetitive prefabricated construction, this study systematically analyzes scheduling characteristics and classifies renewable resources into three categories: local, crew, and global resources. This study also introduces a novel spatial precedence relationship to capture dependencies between activities on adjacent floors. A linear programming model is formulated to minimize both project duration and total resource idle time. The model is developed under several explicit simplifying assumptions to ensure computational tractability while preserving the core-resource interdependencies. The proposed model’s effectiveness is validated through an empirical case study and additional numerical experiments. In the case study, utilization rates for local resources and crews increased by 20% and 8%, respectively. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis of local-resource allocation indicates that increasing the number of tower cranes yields diminishing marginal reductions in project duration, while total resource idle time first decreases and then increases. Consequently, resource over-allocation should be avoided to prevent degradation in utilization.
Yang et al. (2026) studied this question.