Project management with time, cost, and quality considerations

In the project management literature, quantitative models were developed for project crashing to determine the appropriate activities for crashing at minimal cost. In this paper, we suggest that the project quality may be affected by project crashing and develop linear programming models to study the tradeoffs among time, cost, and quality. Each of the three models developed optimizes one of these entities by assigning desired bounds on the other two. An illustrative example with a project network consisting of 13 nodes, 14 activities, and 2 dummy activities is provided. The computational study includes tabulation of the interrelationships among time, cost, and quality.