The Time/Cost Trade-off Curve Problem in Project Management

摘要

The time/cost trade-off models in project management aim to compress the project completion time by acceleratingthe activity durations at an expense of additional resources. The discrete time/cost trade-off problems select a modefor each activity among the prespecified alternatives. These problems are studied under three versions: the budgetproblem, the deadline problem and the time/cost curve problem.In this study we consider the time/cost curve problem, hence aim to find all efficient solutions with respect to thetotal cost and project completion time criteria. We use the budget problem (the problem of minimizing the projectcompletion time without exceeding the available budget) as a subproblem after modifying it so as to return anefficient solution. Our efficient set generation procedure varies the budget value systematically between theminimum and maximum total cost values of all efficient solutions.