An electromagnetic time/cost trade-off optimization in project scheduling

Time/cost trade-offs have been extensively studied in the literature since the development of the critical path method. Recently, the discrete version of the problem formulation has been extended to various practical assumptions, and solved with both exact and heuristic optimization procedures. In this paper, we present a electromagnetic meta-heuristic (EM) algorithm for the discrete time/cost trade-off problem under four different assumptions. We extend the standard electromagnetic meta-heuristic with problem specific features and investigate the influence of various EM specific parameters on the solution quality. We test the new meta-heuristic on a benchmark set from the literature and present extensive computational results.