On Minimum Duration Project Schedule

In order to facilitate building decision support system relative to project crashing, Minimum Duration Project Schedule Problem (MDPSP) is worthy of further research as a case of project crashing. In this paper, MDPSP is formulated using a bi-level programming model, and an algorithm named mfmc-A is presented to find maximum flow & minimum cut set in network with lower & upper arc capacities. Based on mfmc-A and the algorithm presented by Kamburowski for finding minimum cost project schedule, an algorithm named MDPS-A is proposed to solve MDPSP. The theory, on which MDPS-A is based, is presented. MDPS-A not only can find the optimal solution to MDPSP, but also has a good performance in the sense of being implemented on computer, computational time and required memory for computation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MDPS-A is an efficient and robust method to solve MDPSP, and especially applicable to larger and more complex project.