Studies On Methods Of The Discrete Time-cost Trade-off Problem

Project scheduling problem is examining how to assign modes to the activities of aproject to optimize a particular objective function, which is the core part of projectmanagement. The project duration can often be compressed by accelerating some of itsactivities at an additional expense, so that the total completion time is minimized while thebudget constraints are satisfied or the total cost is minimized while meeting a given projectdeadline. This is the so–called time–cost trade–off problem (TCTP) which has beenextensively studied in the past. This thesis investigates the discrete time–cost trade–offproblem (DTCTP).The first chapter introduces the basic concepts and classification of TCTP, and focuseson introducing the discrete time-cost trade-off problem (DTCTP) and giving itsmathematical model and the network representation. The second chapter describes somealgorithms of the DTCTP-D in the general network and a new heuristic algorithm isproposed. Chapter three describes the contraction algorithm of the DTCTP-D in theseries-parallel network and gives the proof of the associative law for the contractionoperation. In the fourth chapter the modified contraction algorithm is applied in moregeneral network structures. The fifth chapter summarizes the results of this thesis, andfinally some outlook on future research work is suggested.