Activity modes selection for project crashing through deterministic simulation

View/Open
Document typeArticle
Defense date2011-12
PublisherSchool of Industrial and Aeronautic Engineering of Terrassa (ETSEIAT). Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Rights accessOpen Access
Except where otherwise noted, content on this work
is licensed under a Creative Commons license
:
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Spain
Abstract
Purpose: The time-cost trade-off problem addressed by CPM-based analytical approaches, assume unlimited resources and the existence of a continuous time-cost function. However, given the discrete nature of most resources, the activities can often be crashed only stepwise. Activity crashing for discrete time-cost function is also known as the activity modes selection problem in the project management. This problem is known to be NP-hard. Sophisticated optimization techniques such as Dynamic Programming, Integer Programming, Genetic Algorithm, Ant Colony Optimization have been used for finding efficient solution to activity modes selection problem. The paper presents a simple method that can provide efficient solution to activity modes selection problem for project crashing.
Design/methodology/approach: Simulation based method implemented on electronic spreadsheet to determine activity modes for project crashing. The method is illustrated with the help of an example.
Findings: The paper shows that a simple approach based on simple heuristic and deterministic simulation can give good result comparable to sophisticated optimization techniques.
Research limitations/implications: The simulation based crashing method presented in this paper is developed to return satisfactory solutions but not necessarily an optimal solution.
Practical implications: The use of spreadsheets for solving the Management Science and Operations Research problems make the techniques more accessible to practitioners. Spreadsheets provide a natural interface for model building, are easy to use in terms of inputs, solutions and report generation, and allow users to perform what-if analysis.
Originality/value: The paper presents the application of simulation implemented on a spreadsheet to determine efficient solution to discrete time cost tradeoff problem.
CitationMohanty, Ashok; Mishra, Jibitesh; Satpathy, Biswajit. Activity modes selection for project crashing through deterministic simulation. "Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management", Desembre 2011, vol. 4, núm. 4, p. 610-623.
DLB-28744-2008
ISSN2013-0953
Files | Description | Size | Format | View |
---|---|---|---|---|
mohanty.pdf | 340,5Kb | View/Open |