Project cost–quality–risk tradeoff analysis in a time-constrained problem

• The paper proposes a multi-objective model to shorten the overall project duration.
• The impact of different project factors on the optimal solution has been assessed.
• The results indicate that the proposed model could yield more efficient solutions compared with traditional techniques.

One of the main issues in any scheduling of projects is the difficulty of convincing customer on total project makespan. There are many occasions where customer informs the contractor that the schedule must be shortened. This action could lead to increase in total cost as well as risk, which may also end of having lower quality project. This paper proposes a multi objective mixed integer linear programming for minimizing “project total extra cost”, “project total risk enhancement” and “project total quality reduction” subject to time constraint. In other words, the proposed study provides a tradeoff between the three mentioned objectives to shorten the overall project duration. Goal attainment method is used for solving the multi objective model and obtaining the Pareto-optimal solutions. The computational experiments are also applied to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed model.