Net-present-value cost/time tradeoff

Cost/time tradeoff (CTTO) is used to increase the net benefit of a project by crashing selected activities. A new heuristic CTTO which balances cost, time and resources is presented. Most heuristic methods only balance two out of the three possible parameters at a time. The new method is called net-present-value CTTO. It uses a net-present-value representation, the Lichtenberg Quality Picture, as a balancing criterion. The usually ignored stochastic effects are also included, using successive scheduling. The results show that NPV CTTO increases the net benefit considerably more than a traditional CTTO method does, and that it is capable of handling relatively large activity networks (of approximtely 200 activities).