A Review of Time Cost Trade-Off in Construction Project

Abstract

The shortcomings of CPM scheduling technique which is by far the most used project management technique in construction project need to be enhanced by use of Time Cost Trade-off (TCT). The TCT analysis involves selecting some of the critical activities in order to reduce their duration through the use of a faster construction method, even at an additional cost. Different combinations of construction methods for the activities can then be formed, each resulting in a specific project duration and direct cost. However, for projects that involve a large number of activities with varying construction options, finding optimal TCT decisions becomes difficult and time consuming. This paper elaborates crashing procedure by solving an example project manually to undrstand the physics of the problem. For real life projects crashing or time-cost trade-off has been solved by several methods, starting with enumerative methods and ending with artificial intelligence. However, in the literature, three major approaches have been used for solving TCT problems: mathematical programming models, heuristic approaches, and genetic algorithms. The paper reviews various techniques to finalize the one simple to apply.