A Fuzzy Simulated Annealing approach for project time-cost tradeoff

Managers often face difficulties when making project decisions that involve large number of interrelated activities – the planning and scheduling of which is project management. Most problems often arise in areas such as product development, production planning and control and setting up the production facilities. One important aspect of project management is activity crashing, i.e. reducing the activity time by adding more resources such as workers, overtime and so on. It is important to decide the optimal crash plan to complete the project within the desired time period. A fuzzy simulated annealing crashing method is introduced in this paper to evaluate project networks and determine the optimum crashing configuration that minimizes the average project cost, due to lateness penalties and crashing costs in the presence of vagueness and uncertainty. Through a real project example the proposed approach is shown effective and efficient in conducting time-cost tradeoff analysis.