An Alternate Solution Approach towards the Time-Cost Tradeoff Problem on Activity-On-Arc Project Network

摘要

Time-cost tradeoff toward optimal project crashing strategy is one of the widely discussed topics in project management. In this paper, we first present an LP formulation to accommodate the discrete and fluctuating activity crash cost using piecewise linear approximation on the AOA (Activity-On-Arc) project network. We then develop a technique to transform such LP formulation into an equivalent problem which can be easily and directly constructed, and efficiently solved. Furthermore, the decision variables in the final solution of this transformed problem have meaningful interpretations towards the desired optimal crashing strategy. It can be inferred that such transformation technique is more efficient when the project contains high number of activities with activities having large number of time units that can be crashed.