Bi-Objective Scheduling Optimization for Discrete Time/Cost Trade-Off in Projects

Hongbo Li, Zhe Xu and Wenchao Wei
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Hongbo Li: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Zhe Xu: School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Wenchao Wei: School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: In sustainable project management, time and cost are two critical factors affecting the success of a project. Time/cost trade-offs in projects accelerate the execution of some activities by increasing the amount of non-renewable resources committed to them and therefore shorten the project duration. The discrete time/cost trade-off problem (DTCTP) has been extensively studied during the past 20 years. However, due to its complexity, the DTCTP—especially the DTCTP curve problem (DTCTP-C)—has only been solved for relatively small instances. To the best of our knowledge, there is no computational performance analysis for solving the DTCTP-C on large project instances with up to 500 activities. This paper aims to fill this gap. We present two bi-objective heuristic algorithms for the DTCTP-C where both project duration and cost are minimized. The objective is to obtain a good appropriate efficient set for the large-scale instances. The first algorithm is based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) and uses a specially designed critical path-based crossover operator. The second algorithm is a steepest descent heuristic which generates efficient solutions by iteratively solving the DTCTP with different deadlines. Computational experiments are conducted to validate the proposed algorithms on a large set of randomly generated problem instances.

Keywords: bi-objective optimization; heuristics; discrete time/cost trade-off; project scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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