Generalized discrete time-cost tradeoff problems

Time-cost tradeoffs have been extensively studied in the literature since the development of the critical path method. Recently, the discrete version of the problem formulation has been extended to various practical assumptions, and solved with both exact and heuristic optimisation procedures, as described in Vanhoucke and Debels (J Sched 10:311–326, 2007). In this chapter, an overviewis given of four variants of the discrete time-cost tradeoff problem and a newly developed electromagnetic meta-heuristic (EM) algorithm to solve these problems is presented. We extend the standard electromagnetic metaheuristic with problem specific features and investigate the influence of various EM parameters on the solution quality. We test the new meta-heuristic on a benchmark set from the literature and present extensive computational results