Robust Project Scheduling is to review the fundamentals of robust project scheduling through the deployment of proactive/reactive project scheduling procedures.

This is the Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management (ICMSEM) held from July 21-23, 2015 at Karlsruhe, Germany. The goals of the conference are to foster international research collaborations in Management Science and Engineering Management as well as to provide a forum to present current findings. These proceedings cover various areas in management science and engineering management. It focuses on the identification of management science problems in engineering and innovatively using management theory and methods to solve engineering problems effectively. It also establishes a new management theory and methods based on experience of new management issues in engineering. Readers interested in the fields of management science and engineering management will benefit from the latest cutting-edge innovations and research advances presented in these proceedings and will find new ideas and research directions. A total number of 132 papers from 15 countries are selected for the proceedings by the conference scientific committee through rigorous referee review. The selected papers in the first volume are focused on Intelligent System and Management Science covering areas of Intelligent Systems, Logistics Engineering, Information Technology and Risk Management. The selected papers in the second volume are focused on Computing and Engineering Management covering areas of Computing Methodology, Project Management, Industrial Engineering and Decision Making Systems.

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 book introduces the field of resource-constrained project scheduling. State-of-the-art reviews of optimal and heuristic procedures are provided for classical project scheduling models. Furthermore, new models which are relevant for practical problem settings, are introduced. The main emphasis is on newly developed competitive heuristic methods. Contents: Introduction. - Description of the Problems.- Classification of Schedules.- Characterisation and Generation of Instances.- The Single-Mode Project Scheduling Problem.- The Multi-Mode Project Scheduling Problem.- Project Scheduling with Given Deadline.- Project Scheduling with Setup Times.- Applications to Production Management.- Concluding Remarks.- List of Notations.- List of Abbreviations.

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.

A project planning and decision support model is developed and applied to identify and reduce risk and uncertainty in deconstruction project planning. It allows calculating building inventories based on sensor information and construction standards and it computes robust project plans for different scenarios with multiple modes, constrained renewable resources and locations. A reactive and flexible planning element is proposed in the case of schedule infeasibility during project execution.

This paper proposes a branch-and-bound algorithm (B&B) for the proactive scheduling problem, which incorporates a degree of anticipation for variability in practical projects. First, the resource-constrained proactive scheduling model is formulated. Second, solving its resource-unconstrained problem with an adapted Fulkerson algorithm provides an upper-bound solution. Then, the subproblems of the model are derived by introducing additional precedence relationships for resolving the resource conflict in the upper-bound solution. Third, we solve the resource-constrained proactive scheduling problem with the proposed B&B algorithm. The resource conflicts detected in an upper-bound solution are resolved by adding extra precedence relationships. According to the problem analysis, two dominance rules proposed for additional node fathoming aim to improve the algorithm. Finally, we conduct an extensive computational experiment on 3,000 randomly generated instances. The obtained results show that the B&B algorithm reduces the computational time on average by 94% compared with CPLEX. In addition, the sensitivity analysis of the three key parameters indicates their different impacts on the trend in terms of the computational time and identifies the project deadline among these three parameters as the bottleneck for improving project robustness.

Service chain management enables service organisations to improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs. In this book, Christos Voudouris and his BT colleagues together with experts from industry and academia present the latest innovations and technologies used to manage the operations of a service company. The viewpoints presented are based on the BT experience and on associated research and development. Service chain management is looked at both from the enterprise perspective and from the standpoints of the service professional and customer. The focus is on real-world challenges.