ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the dynamic programming recursion and applies it to a multi-project investment problem. It revisits the time-cost trade-off problem using dynamic programming. Dynamic programming is a technique that can be used to solve many optimization problems that require interrelated solutions, i.e., decisions which must be made in a sequence and which influence future decisions in that sequence. In most applications, dynamic programming obtains solutions by working backwards from the beginning, thus breaking a large, unwieldy problem into a series of smaller, more tractable problems. The classical definition of project indicates is a one-time job which consists of several activities. Therefore, most of the models representing the project scheduling in the literature are static. Butcher presents a dynamic programming model to solve the time-cost trade-off when the project networks are pure series and pure parallel. Azaron and Tavakkoli Moghaddam develop a multi-objective model for the time-cost trade-off problem in a dynamic Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) network.
