Discrete time/cost trade-offs in project scheduling with time-switch constraints

Mario Vanhoucke, E Demeulemeester and W Herroelen
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E Demeulemeester: Operations Management Group, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
W Herroelen: Operations Management Group, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2002, vol. 53, issue 7, 741-751

Abstract: Abstract The discrete time/cost trade-off problem assumes the duration of project activities to be discrete, non-increasing functions of the amount of a single non-renewable resource. The problem has been studied under three possible objectives. The so-called deadline problem involves the scheduling of project activities in order to minimize the total cost of the project while meeting a given deadline. The budget problem aims at minimizing the project duration without exceeding a given budget. A third objective involves the generation of the complete efficient time/cost profile over the set of feasible project durations. In this paper we describe a solution procedure for the deadline problem in which three special cases of time-switch constraints are involved. These constraints impose a specified starting time on the project activities and force them to be inactive during specified time periods. We propose a branch-and-bound algorithm and a heuristic procedure which both make use of a lower bound calculation for the discrete time/cost trade-off problem (without time-switch constraints). The procedures have been coded in Visual C++, version 6.0 under Windows 2000 and have been validated on a randomly generated problem set. We also discuss an illustrative example based on a real-life situation.

Keywords: project management; CPM; time/cost trade-off problem; time-switch constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601351

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