Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling
Resource-constrained project scheduling is a widely discussed project management topic which has roots in and relevance for both academic and practical oriented environments. Due to its inherent problem complexity, it has been the subject of numerous rese
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Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling
Abstract Resource-constrained project scheduling is a widely discussed project management topic which has roots in and relevance for both academic and practical oriented environments. Due to its inherent problem complexity, it has been the subject of numerous research projects leading to a wide and diverse set of procedures and algorithms to construct resource feasible project schedules. Thanks to its practical value, many of the research results have found their way to practical project management projects. This chapter gives an overview of the project scheduling efforts and needs in order to bring the academics closer to real life projects and vice versa. It gives an extensive overview on the use of resources in dynamic scheduling problems and discusses various scheduling objectives to optimize the schedule to the wishes and needs of the company or project owner. The chapter also gives a set of techniques to validate the quality of the resource feasible baseline schedules and highlights some important features and characteristics that should be taken into account when using scheduling tools.
7.1 Introduction This chapter elaborates on the critical path based scheduling approach discussed in Part I of this book where it is assumed that resources are not taken into account when scheduling projects. However, project activities are executed by resources (usually people) which mostly have a limited availability over the complete time horizon of the project. This chapter puts a detailed emphasis on these resources required to execute the project activities. Resource-constrained project scheduling is the process of constructing a project schedule within the limited amount of resources available. It requires the examination of the possible unbalanced use of resources over time to resolve over-allocations (the so-called resource conflicts) when more resources are required than available. The critical path based scheduling methods of the previous part will often schedule certain activities simultaneously. When more resources such as machines or people M. Vanhoucke, Project Management with Dynamic Scheduling, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-40438-2 7, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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are needed than there are available, these activities will have to be rescheduled concurrently or even sequentially to resolve the resource constraints. Resourceconstrained project scheduling is the process of resolving these resource conflicts under different scheduling objectives. The outline of this chapter is as follows. Section 7.2 gives a brief description of the two main resource classes used in resource-constrained project scheduling. Section 7.3 discusses various resource-constrained project scheduling types under different scheduling objectives. It will be shown that each scheduling objective serves another practical project purpose and determines the main characteristics of the project scheduling approach. In Sect. 7.4, easy and quick sched
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