A robust scheduling of projects with time, cost, and quality considerations

Quality is one of the main pillars that should be effectively considered in managing of industrial projects. In traditional project scheduling problems, only the time and cost are considered without the quality parameters. In this paper, it is suggested that the quality parameter is embedded into the traditional time–cost trade-off problem to develop a time, cost, and quality trade-off problem (TCQTP) with some practical assumptions. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been extensively treated in literature yet. The contributions of this article are in threefold: (1) incorporating a practical assumption to the TCQTP that is a relaxation of deterministic assumption to stochastic ones, which no paper has ever attempted to consider it in TCQTP; (2) relaxing the linearity assumption of time function, cost function, and quality function to a general form; and (3) integrating the TCQTP with a robust solution method to minimize the variation effect on time, cost, and quality. Computational experiments, which were done on benchmark problem, show the applicability and good performance of suggested TCQTP.