Developing a decision support system for cost-time trade off in project management

Project managers are generally requested to finish their project in a scheduled time while reducing the total cost. They can reduce the project duration by assigning more resources to the project activities. Thus, the project managers generally face a trade-off between cost and time. Some of the project activities are sometimes subcontracted to suppliers. In such cases project managers need to evaluate project activity times and their risks, project completion time, project total cost and quality of their supplier support. In this study, a multi-criteria decision support system is proposed where activity normal and crash times are evaluated along with the supplier ranking with respect to some of their attributes.