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.

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.

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.

Project management can be broadly defined as the process of managing, allocating and timing resources to achieve given objectives in an efficient and expedient manner. The objectives of the book cover three areas: classification; procedures; and problems.

Within a project human and non-human resources are pulled together in a tempo raray organization in order to achieve a predefined goal (d. [20], p. 187). That is, in contrast to manufacturing management, project management is directed to an end. One major function of project management is the scheduling of the project. Project scheduling is the time-based arrangement of the activities comprising the project subject to precedence-, time-and resource-constraints (d. [4], p. 170). In the 1950's the standard methods MPM (Metra Potential Method) and CPM (Cri tical Path Method) were developed. Given deterministic durations and precedence constraints the minimum project length, time windows for the start times and critical paths can be calculated. At the same time another group of researchers developed the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) (d. [19], [73] and [90]). In contrast to MPM and CPM, random variables describe the activity durations. Based on the optimistic, most likely and pessimistic estimations of the activity durations an assumed Beta distribution is derived in order to calculate the distribution of the project duration, the critical events, the distribution of earliest and latest occurence of an event, the distribution of the slack of the events and the probability of exceeding a date. By the time the estimates of the distributions have been improved (d. e.g. [52] and [56]). Nevertheless, there are some points of critique concerning the estimation of the resulting distributions and probabilities (d. e.g. [48], [49] and [50]).

Robust Project Scheduling is to review the fundamentals of robust project scheduling through the deployment of proactive/reactive project scheduling procedures.