Environmental Impacts Trade off Problem and Solving it with MOPSO and MOFA Algorithms

The dramatic increase in number and turnover of the projects of organizations on one hand and the Aggravation of environmental concerns on the other hand, lead to Increasing attention to environmental concerns in the field of project management. Adding this factor to the other customary factors that have an impact on project scheduling is a reasonable approach toward evaluation and control of destructive environmental effects. To this end, environmental impacts have been considered as a novel factor in the time-cost trade off problem and a new mathematical model, which includes time, cost and environmental impacts simultaneously, has been proposed in this article. Due to its NP- hardness, two metaheuristic algorithms, namely MOPSO and MOFA, combined with a heuristic algorithm were coded in MATLAB software. The heuristic algorithm’s function is to transform infeasible solutions to feasible ones. The results of implementing the aforementioned model and algorithms in a drilling project indicate that project managers can choose between different amounts of time, cost and environmental impacts. Moreover, they can control environmental impacts of a given project as well. Furthermore, the values of Pareto answers criteria demonstrated that MOPSO algorithm outperforms MOFA algorithm in this project.