Time Cost Trade-Off using Linear Programming Approach

Abstract

Despite the long history and expanding use of CPM, the literature indicates that CPM has a number of drawbacks that raise concerns about its use in the construction industry. In addition to scheduling projects, project managers are frequently confronted with the problem of having to reduce the schedule completion time than that indicated by the CPM network analysis to meet a pre-specified deadline. Time-Cost Trade-off (TCT) analysis is a technique used to overcome CPM's lack of this ability to confine the schedule to a specified duration. This paper explored from available literature an efficient LP-Solver approach to solve project crashing problems. The results of a case study are presented. The approach uses conventional critical path concept to determine project completion time and to define network structure in Excel. It is simple and straight forward, with less decision variables and constraints.