Time‐Cost Trade‐Off Among Related Activities
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 115, Issue 3
Abstract
This paper describes the typical pragmatic approach that construction planners taken in performing time‐cost trade‐off (TCT). In general, projects have major dominant characteristics, operations, or resources whose planning affects or dominates planning of other operations and resources. Planning focuses first on the dominant characteristics and is then fine‐tuned in its details. Planners typically cycle between plan generation and cost estimating at ever finer levels of detail until they settle on a plan that has an acceptable cost and duration. Computerized TCT methods do not follow this cycle. Instead, they separate the plan into activities, each of which is assumed to have a single time‐cost curve in which all points are compatible and independent of all points in other activities' curves and that contains all direct cost differences among its methods. In general, these assumptions are not true for construction. Construction activities are related because they share methods and resources. Crashing activities usually require changes from normal, least‐cost methods and resources. Changes in one activity are not independent of changes in related activities. Therefore, normal computerized TCT techniques are conceptually wrong for construction and they are not useful in practice.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
1.
Antill, J. M. (1982). Critical path methods in construction practice, 3rd Ed., John Wiley and Sons, New York, N.Y.
2.
Fondahl, J. W. (1961). “A non‐computer approach to the critical path method for the construction industry.” Technical Report No. 9, The Construction Inst., Dept. of Civ. Engrg., Stanford Univ., Stanford, Calif.
3.
Fulkerson, D. R. (1961). “A network flow computation for project cost curves.” Manage. Sci., 7(2), 167–179.
4.
Fulkerson, D. R., and Ford, C. R. (1962). “Flows in networks.” The Rand Corporation.
5.
Harris, R. B. (1978). Precedence and arrow networking techniques for construction. John Wiley and Sons, New York, N.Y.
6.
Kelley, J. E. (1961). “Critical path planning and scheduling: Mathematical basis.” Oper. Res., 9(3), 296–320.
7.
Moder, J. J., and Phillips, C. R. (1970). Project management with CPM and PERT, 2nd Ed., Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, N.Y.
8.
Reda, R. M. (1986). “Time‐cost trade‐off modeling of related activities by using mixed integer programming,” thesis submitted to the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, Mich., in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 ASCE.
History
Published online: Sep 1, 1989
Published in print: Sep 1989
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.