Scheduling of resource-constrained projects (Q1819247)

Project management provides efficient instruments for various situations. Especially, scheduling of execution dates for the sub-activities (jobs) required for completing the project is an important managerial task. From the mathematical point of view it is a complex problem since frequently constrained resources are reasons of conflicts between concurrent projects or between sub-activities of a single project. Part I of the book deals mainly with the resource-constrained project scheduling problem which consists in assigning execution dates to the sub-activities of a project, such that it is terminated as early as possible without exceeding the availabilities of the resources. A generalized version of the problem is presented which is considered by most of the commercial management software packages on hand including possible extensions examined in the literature. It includes Chap. 1: The project management process; Chap. 2: Project planning and control; Chap. 3: Resource-constrained scheduling problems. Part II of the book is devoted to solution methods for resource-constrained project scheduling. Since the problems of this type are NP-hard, procedures which yield satisfactory solutions in a reasonable computation time should be developed. A number of new approaches are introduced for this purpose, e.g. heuristic procedures based on priority rules and tabu search, lower bound methods, branch and bound procedures and others including tests of their effectiveness and comprehensive computational experiments. Part II contains: Chap 4: Lower bound methods; Chap. 5: Heuristic procedures (i.e. priority-rule based methods and improvement methods); Chap. 6: Exact procedures (mainly branch and bound procedures); Chap. 7: Computational experiments.