Maximizing project cash availability

Consider a project during the life cycle of which there are cash payouts and in-flows. To better meet his financial commitments, the project owner would like to meet all deadlines without running out of cash. We show that the cash availability objective is similar to the total weighted flowtime used to measure work-in-progress performance in the scheduling and inventory control literatures. In this article we provide several specialized solution methods for the problem of minimizing total weighted flowtime in an arbitrary acyclic project network, subject to activity release times and due dates, where the activity weights may be positive or negative and represent cash in- and out-flows. We describe the structure of an optimal solution and provide several efficient algorithms and their complexity based on mincost and maxflow formulations.