A goal-programming model for activity crashing in project networks

Managers often face the problem of making project decisions that involve a large number of interrelated activities-the planning and scheduling of which is project management. These problems often arise in areas such as product development, production planning and control and setting up of production facilities. One important aspect of project management is activity crashing, i.e. reducing activity time by adding more resources such as workers, overtime and so on. It is important to decide the optimal crash plan to complete the project within the desired time period. The usual practice is to use a linear programming (LP) approach. The paper finds that the solution obtained from LP is not always effective and shows that a goal-programming approach can be used efficiently in such decision-making problems.