A New Heuristic Algorithm for Time-cost Trade-off Problem Taking into Account Monetary Value

Time-cost trade-off is one of the most important subjects in project management and of interest to contractors. The goal of time-cost trade-off is sensivity analysis of project costs to changes in activity duration in order to obtain the best combination of activity duration decrease, in a way that the sum of project costs is minimized. In the heuristics presented in this area, time crashing is on the base of the minimum cost slope of activities. But since projects are usually performed over long periods, they can be affected by interest rate. In this paper, a new heuristic algorithm is presented in order to obtain the best combination of activity duration decrease while the monetary value is taken into account, with the goal of minimizing the sum of present value of project costs