  The paper focuses on a multidimensional optimization problem, which is
formulated in terms of tropical mathematics and consists in minimizing a
nonlinear objective function subject to linear inequality constraints. To solve
the problem, we follow an approach based on the introduction of an additional
unknown variable to reduce the problem to solving linear inequalities, where
the variable plays the role of a parameter. A necessary and sufficient
condition for the inequalities to hold is used to evaluate the parameter,
whereas the general solution of the inequalities is taken as a solution of the
original problem. Under fairly general assumptions, a complete direct solution
to the problem is obtained in a compact vector form. The result is applied to
solve a problem in project scheduling when an optimal schedule is given by
minimizing the flow time of activities in a project under various activity
precedence constraints. As an illustration, a numerical example of optimal
scheduling is also presented.
