Branch and bound based solution algorithms for the budget constrained discrete time/cost trade-off problem

Abstract

The time/cost trade-off models in project management aim to reduce the project completion time by putting extra resources on activity durations. The budget problem in discrete time/cost trade-off scheduling selects a time/cost mode for each activity so as to minimize the project completion time without exceeding the available budget. There may be alternative modes that solve the budget problem optimally and each solution may have a different total cost value. In this study we consider the budget problem and aim to find the minimum cost solution among the minimum project completion time solutions. We analyse the structure of the problem together with its linear programming relaxation and derive some mechanisms for reducing the problem size. We solve the reduced problem by branch and bound based optimization and heuristic algorithms. We find that our branch and bound algorithm finds optimal solutions for medium-sized problem instances in reasonable times and the heuristic algorithms produce high quality solutions very quickly.

Keywords:

• project management
• time/cost trade-off
• budget problem

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the referees for their valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper.