A Trade-off (or Tradeoff) Is A Situation That Involves Losing

A trade-off (or tradeoff) is a situation that involves losing one quality or aspect of something in return for gaining another quality or aspect. It implies a decision to be made with full comprehension of both the upside and downside of a particular choice. In economics the term is expressed as opportunity cost, referring to the most preferred alternative given up. A trade-off, then, involves a sacrifice that must be made to obtain a certain product, rather than other products that can be made using the same required resources. For a person going to a basketball game, its opportunity cost is the money and time expended, say that would have been spent watching a particular television program.

Time resource trade off Abstract Given a project network with a set of tasks to be completed according to some precedence relationship, the objective is to determine efficient project schedules for a range of project realization times. This problem is referred to as the time-resource tradeoff problem. Associated with each task are its normal duration, maximum allowable crash range, and resource cost per time unit for each resource. A multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) model is presented. The time-cost tradeoff technique is extended to solve the time-resource tradeoff problem. The methodology assumes that the project manager's (the decision maker) utility function over the resource consumption costs is linear with unknown weights for each resource. Enumerative and interactive algorithms utilizing Geoffrion's P(λ) approach, are presented as solution techniques. It is demonstrated that both versions have desirable computational times