Project Scheduling is concerned with the allocation of scarce resources over time. The rich optimisation models with time windows that are treated in this book cover a multitude of practical decision problems arising in diverse application areas such as construction engineering or make-to-order production planning. The book shows how Constraint Propagation techniques from Artificial Intelligence can be successfully combined with Operations Research methods for developing powerful exact and heuristic solution algorithms for a very general class of scheduling problems. Example applications demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

A survey of the state of the art of deterministic resource-constrained project scheduling with time windows. General temporal constraints and several different types of limited resources are considered. A large variety of time-based, financial, and resource-based objectives - important in practice - are studied. A thorough structural analysis of the feasible region of project scheduling problems and a classification and detailed investigation of objective functions are performed, which can be exploited for developing efficient exact and heuristic solution methods. New interesting applications of project scheduling to production and operations management as well as investment projects are discussed in the second edition.

Project scheduling problems are, generally speaking, the problems of allocating scarce resources over time to perform a given set of activities. The resources are nothing other than the arbitrary means which activities complete for. Also the activities can have a variety of interpretations. Thus, project scheduling problems appear in a large spectrum of real-world situations, and, in consequence, they have been intensively studied for almost fourty years. Almost a decade has passed since the multi-author monograph: R. Slowinski, 1. W~glarz (eds. ), Advances in Project Scheduling, Elsevier, 1989, summarizing the state-of-the-art across project scheduling problems, was published. Since then, considerable progress has been made in all directions of modelling and finding solutions to these problems. Thus, the proposal by Professor Frederick S. Hillier to edit a handbook which reports on the recent advances in the field came at an exceptionally good time and motivated me to accept the challenge. Fortunately, almost all leading experts in the field have accepted my invitation and presented their completely new advances often combined with expository surveys. Thanks to them, the handbook stands a good chance of becoming a key reference point on the current state-of-the-art in project scheduling, as well as on new directions in the area. The contents are divided into four parts. The first one, dealing with classical models -exact algorithms, is preceded by a proposition of the classification scheme for scheduling problems.

Our objectives in writing Project Scheduling: A Research Handbook are threefold: (1) Provide a unified scheme for classifying the numerous project scheduling problems occurring in practice and studied in the literature; (2) Provide a unified and up-to-date treatment of the state-of-the-art procedures developed for their solution; (3) Alert the reader to various important problems that are still in need of considerable research effort. Project Scheduling: A Research Handbook has been divided into four parts. Part I consists of three chapters on the scope and relevance of project scheduling, on the nature of project scheduling, and finally on the introduction of a unified scheme that will be used in subsequent chapters for the identification and classification of the project scheduling problems studied in this book. Part II focuses on the time analysis of project networks. Part III carries the discussion further into the crucial topic of scheduling under scarce resources. Part IV deals with robust scheduling and stochastic scheduling issues. Numerous tables and figures are used throughout the book to enhance the clarity and effectiveness of the discussions. For the interested and motivated reader, the problems at the end of each chapter should be considered as an integral part of the presentation.

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.

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.

This book presents models and algorithms for complex scheduling problems. Besides resource-constrained project scheduling problems with applications also job-shop problems with flexible machines, transportation or limited buffers are discussed. Discrete optimization methods like linear and integer programming, constraint propagation techniques, shortest path and network flow algorithms, branch-and-bound methods, local search and genetic algorithms, and dynamic programming are presented. They are used in exact or heuristic procedures to solve the introduced complex scheduling problems. Furthermore, methods for calculating lower bounds are described. Most algorithms are formulated in detail and illustrated with examples. In this second edition some errors were corrected, some parts were explained in more detail, and new material has been added. In particular, further generalizations of the RCPSP, additional practical applications and some more algorithms were integrated.