Multi-objective project management by fuzzy integrated goal programming

Abstract

Regulating conflicting goals with the usage of all related resources through organization is the main work of project management (PM). In this paper, the issue of evaluating the conflicting goals tradeoffs of projects was to develop a plan that the decision-maker can use to shorten their total completion time and minimize the increasing project total cost. The study showed that the total project cost minimization problem and crashing cost minimization problem with reference to direct, indirect cost and relevant constraints can be solved simultaneously via the proposed fuzzy multi-objective linear programming (FMOLP) method. Next, considering its completion time in a suitable range, we are trying to find more efficient ways of utilizing the fuzzy set to solve fuzzy multi-objective PM decision problem, and the proposed approach applies the signed distance method to transform fuzzy numbers into crisp values. The proposed approach considers the imprecise nature of the input data by implementing the minimum operator and also assumes that each objective function has a fuzzy goal. In addition, the focus of this approach is minimizing the worst upper bound to obtain an efficient solution which is close to the best lower bound of each objective function. Moreover, for attaining our objective, at the end of this paper, a detailed numerical example will be presented to illustrate the feasibility of applying the proposed approach to actual PM decision problem. Furthermore, it was believed that this approach can be utilized to solve other multi-objective decision making problems in practice. Key words: Project management, fuzzy set, fuzzy multi-objective linear programming.