A parallel multi-objective scatter search for optimising incentive contract design in projects

We present a novel optimisation approach for incentive contract design within a project setting. the structure of the remuneration is one of the key challenges faced by the project owner when (s)he decides to hire a contractor. The proposed technique builds on the recently proposed contract design methodology by Kerkhove and Vanhoucke (Omega, 2015). Specifically, a novel multi-objective scatter search heuristic is proposed and implemented using parallelisation. Both single- and multi-population implementations of this heuristic are compared to the original full-factorial approach as well as commercial optimisation software. The results of the computational experiments indicate that the single-population parallel scatter search procedure significantly outperforms the other solution strategies in terms of both speed and solution quality.