Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling

Abstract

This title presents a large variety of models and algorithms dedicated to solving one of the most important problems in project management, manufacturing and resource optimization; the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), which aims to schedule at minimal duration a set of activities subject to precedence constraints and the limited availability of resources. Part 1 presents and analyzes the standard variant of the RCPSP 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. Part 2 focuses on several other variants of the RCPSP and 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. Part 3 presents industrial case studies in which the RCPSP plays a central role. 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.