ABSTRACT

Project managers today rely on scheduling tools based on the Critical Path Method (CPM) to
determine the overall project duration and the activities float times. Such data provide important
information about the degree of flexibility with respect to the project schedule as well as the
critical and noncritical activities, which leads to greater efficiency in planning and control of
projects. While CPM has been useful for scheduling construction projects, years of practice and
research have highlighted a number of serious drawbacks that limit its use as a decision support
tool. The traditional representation of CPM is based on two unrealistic assumptions: that the
project deadline is not restricted and that resources are unlimited. With CPM, therefore, the most
cost-effective corrective actions needed in order to recover delays and overruns cannot be
determined. This dissertation is based on the view that to overcome CPM drawbacks, this
dissertation propose from existing research a new mechanism in the form of an integrated
heuristic approach incorporating constraint resource scheduling (CRS) and Time Cost Trade-off
(TCT) to meet the deadline with constrained resources.
To demonstrate the ability of the heuristic approach to provide better analysis than the traditional
CPM, a number of case studies are used to show its ability to (1) accurately calculate the
schedule for a specified duration less than the normal project duration by employing TCT as a
linear programming problem solved by Excel solver. (2) Achieve better resource allocation and
facilitate resource leveling first by using the available activity floats and then, if necessary, by
extending the project duration using the Ms-Project software; and (3) to repeat the steps (1) and
(2) in the form of a heuristic approach till a feasible near optimum solution is achieved. This
work thus explores an incorporation of CRS & TCT in the well-known CPM techniques. The
explored approach is expected to help project managers achieve a better level of control over
projects insofar as meeting project goals within the specified constraints.