The book is devoted to structural issues, algorithms, and applications of resource allocation problems in project management. Special emphasis is given to a unifying framework within which a large variety of project scheduling problems can be treated. Those problems involve general temporal constraints among project activities, different types of scarce resources, and a broad class of regular and nonregular objective functions ranging from time-based and financial to resource levelling functions. The diversity of the models proposed allows for covering many features arising in scheduling applications beyond the field of project management such as short-term production planning in the manufacturing or process industries.

Industrial, financial, commercial or any kinds of project have at least one common feature: the better organized they are, the higher the profit or the lower the cost. Project management is the principle of planning different projects and keeping them on track within time, cost and resource constraints. The need for effective project management is ever-increasing. The complexity of the environment we live in requires more sophisticated methods than it did just a couple of decades ago. Project managers might face insurmountable obstacles in their work if they do not adapt themselves to the changing circumstances. On the other hand, better knowledge of project management can result in better plans, schedules and, last but not least, more contracts and more profit. This knowledge can help individuals and firms to stay alive in this competitive market and, in the global sense, utilize the finite resources of our planet in a more efficient way.

This title presents a large variety of models and algorithms dedicated to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), which aims at scheduling at minimal duration a set of activities subject to precedence constraints and limited resource availabilities. In the first part, the standard variant of RCPSP is presented and analyzed as a combinatorial optimization problem. Constraint programming and integer linear programming formulations are given. Relaxations based on these formulations and also on related scheduling problems are presented. Exact methods and heuristics are surveyed. Computational experiments, aiming at providing an empirical insight on the difficulty of the problem, are provided. The second part of the book focuses on several other variants of the RCPSP and on their solution methods. Each variant takes account of real-life characteristics which are not considered in the standard version, such as possible interruptions of activities, production and consumption of resources, cost-based approaches and uncertainty considerations. The last part presents industrial case studies where the RCPSP plays a central part. Applications are presented in various domains such as assembly shop and rolling ingots production scheduling, project management in information technology companies and instruction scheduling for VLIW processor architectures.

This multi-author volume, containing contributions from international experts in the field, presents recent developments in project scheduling for both theory and practice. It is organized in three parts: I. Basic deterministic models; II. Special deterministic models; III. Stochastic models. A variety of approaches is presented dealing with multiple-category resource constraints, different mathematical models of activities, and various project performance measures in single and multiobjective formulation. Exact and heuristic algorithms are presented for both deterministic and stochastic project description.The volume will be of special interest to scientists, students, decision makers, executive managers, consultants and practitioners involved in systems management or operations research, in particular in business, engineering, and finance, but also in other areas of pure and applied sciences.

Keywords: activity networks, stochastic optimization, project scheduling, resource allocation, phase type distribution.

Project management has become a widespread instrument enabling organizations to efficiently master the challenges of steadily shortening product life cycles, global markets and decreasing profit margins. With projects increasing in size and complexity, their planning and control represents one of the most crucial management tasks. This is especially true for scheduling, which is concerned with establishing execution dates for the sub-activities to be performed in order to complete the project. The ability to manage projects where resources must be allocated between concurrent projects or even sub-activities of a single project requires the use of commercial project management software packages. However, the results yielded by the solution procedures included are often rather unsatisfactory. Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects develops more efficient procedures, which can easily be integrated into software packages by incorporated programming languages, and thus should be of great interest for practitioners as well as scientists working in the field of project management. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the project management process is described and the management tasks to be accomplished during project planning and control are discussed. This allows for identifying the major scheduling problems arising in the planning process, among which the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is the most important. Part II deals with efficient computer-based procedures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and its generalized version. Since both problems are NP-hard, the development of such procedures which yield satisfactory solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time is very challenging, and a number of new and very promising approaches are introduced. This includes heuristic procedures based on priority rules and tabu search as well as lower bound methods and branch and bound procedures which can be applied for computing optimal solutions.

Due to the increasing importance of product differentiation and collapsing product life cycles, a growing number of value-adding activities in the industry and service sector are organized in projects. Projects come in many forms, often taking considerable time and consuming a large amount of resources. The management and scheduling of projects represents a challenging task and project performance may have a considerable impact on an organization's competitiveness. This handbook presents state-of-the-art approaches to project management and scheduling. More than sixty contributions written by leading experts in the field provide an authoritative survey of recent developments. The book serves as a comprehensive reference, both, for researchers and project management professionals. The handbook consists of two volumes. Volume 1 is devoted to single-modal and multi-modal project scheduling. Volume 2 presents multi-project problems, project scheduling under uncertainty and vagueness, managerial approaches and a separate part on applications, case studies and information systems.