Intelligent systems in project planning

Abstract

As a modern kind of engineering management tools, intelligent systems can facilitate better business or organizational decision-making. This chapter discusses several applications of intelligent systems in project management practice. First, the relevant literature is reviewed and different applications of intelligent tools are categorized into seven problem types, i.e. recognizing the relations between activities, estimating duration of activities and project completion time, project scheduling, resource leveling, forecasting project total cost, cash flow/S-curve estimation, and estimating project quality level. This categorization provides the basis for analyzing the underlying problem types and prepares the ground for future research via a faster access to the relevant literature. Then, a real case study and the corresponding results are discussed in order to show the potential usefulness and applicability of such intelligent tools in practice.