Credit constrained project scheduling with discounted cash flow under different payment terms

Payment terms may exert a great impact on cash flow distribution over projects and revenue of contractors. Based on this fact, this paper involves the bank credit limit based project scheduling problem with discounted cash flow under different payment terms. The authors give the survey on research status at first, and then identify the studied problem and construct the project scheduling optimization models. For the NP-hardness of the problem, a simulated annealing algorithm is developed and its performance is compared and verified through a computational experiment based on a set of standard instances generated randomly. Ultimately, an instance is utilized to illustrate the research and the sensitivity analysis of some key parameters on project revenue is carried out. The conclusions obtained are as follows: The net present value ascends with a diminishing marginal utility as the bank credit limit or the project deadline augment. And it goes up linearly and monotonically with the increase of the payment proportion and goes down with the increase of the discount rate at a negative exponential fashion. The research in this paper can provide decision supports for contractors to arrange project schedule and optimize cash flows.