On the discrete time, cost and quality trade-off problem

In this paper a solution procedure is developed to study the tradeoffs among time, cost and quality in the management of a project. This problem assumes the duration and quality of project activities to be discrete, non-increasing functions of a single non-renewable resource. Three inter-related integer programming models are developed such that each model optimizes one of the given entities by assigning desired bounds on the other two. Different forms of quality aggregations and effect of activity mode reductions are also investigated. The computational performance of the models is presented using a numerical example.