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.
