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.

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.