The Effect of Price Discount on Time-Cost Trade-off Problem Using Genetic Algorithm

Time-cost trade off problem (TCTP), known in the literature as project crashing problem (PCP) and project speeding up problem (PSP) is a part of project management in planning phase. In this problem, determining the optimal levels of activity durations and activity costs which satisfy the project goal(s), leads to a balance between the project completion time and the project total cost. A large amount of literature has studied this problem under various behavior of cost function. But, in all of them, influence of discount has not been investigated. Hence, in this paper, TCTP would be studied considering the influence of discount on the resource price, using genetic algorithm (GA). The performance of proposed idea has been tested on a medium scale test problem and several computational experiments have been conducted to investigate the appropriate levels of proposed GA considering accuracy and computational time.