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

Author

Listed:
  • 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)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Hongbo Li & Zhe Xu & Wenchao Wei, 2018. "Bi-Objective Scheduling Optimization for Discrete Time/Cost Trade-Off in Projects," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(8), pages 1-15, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:8:p:2802-:d:162472
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    References listed on IDEAS

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