Towards optimal formwork pairing on construction sites

Minimizing shutterings assembling time on construction sites can yield significant savings in labor costs and crane moves. It requires solving a pairing problem that optimizes the ability for the crane to move chains of shutterings as a whole when they can be later reused together to frame another wall of the site. In this paper, we show that this problem is NP-hard in the strong sense as well as both its multiflow and ordering aspects. We also introduce a linear relaxation that computes reasonably good lower bounds of the objective, and describe a Tabu Search based on pairings insertion and ejection that builds promising solutions.