Presentation of exact and metaheurestic solution method for minimization project completion time with considering budget constraint problem

Project planning and scheduling are one of the most important issues in construction engineering and management. It is being crucial to progress developed countries. One of the major challenges in construction project management is time and cost management. The traditional view lonely is not able to meet the needs of this field. Therefore, the use of modern management approaches can be greatly helpful. Time and cost are among the important objectives of each project. Cost and time trade-off is among the major important issues in projects planning and control and the main of solving this problem is actually analysis of interaction of different types of project costs and time of the project. In this paper, a time and cost trade off project scheduling problem under budget constraint is studied. For this purpose, a meta-heuristic genetic algorithm is developed to find the optimal solution in MATLAB. Completion time sensitivity analysis is done according to different budget level. In order to validate proposed algorithm, problem is solved by GAMS and the outputs between them are compared. The results show that proposed meta heuristic algorithm is able to solve problem optimally so that differences between samples solution were zero in different budget level.