Discrete Symbiotic Organisms Search method for solving large-scale time-cost trade-off problem in construction scheduling

•A novel discrete symbiotic organisms search method is presented for the large-scale DCOPs.•Network-based heuristic parasitism operator is designed to advance the exploration ability.•DSOS achieves better or close performance comparing to the state-of-the art methods.•High quality solutions are achieved for new large-scale project instances of real-life complexity.