scheduling

The determination of the critical path of a project requires forward and backward calculation steps (see “Scheduling projects: How to determine the critical path using activity slack calculations?”) and allows for the calculation of three different slack values. In this article, the following three definitions of activity slack will be discussed:

• Total slack
• Safety slack
• Free slack

Project scheduling is the act of constructing a timetable for each project activity, and differs in complexity due to the presence of renewable resources with limited availability. The construction of a resource feasible project schedule within the restrictions of a limited availability of renewable resources can be done to optimize a predefined scheduling objective (see “Resource constrained project scheduling: What is my scheduling objective?”). In this article, the differences between three possible schedules that can be constructed from project network data are described, as follows: 

Minimizing the total duration of a resource-constrained project is often a generally accepted project scheduling objective (see “What is my scheduling objective? Minimizing the project lead time”). However, optimizing a scheduling objective within the presence of limited renewable resources often requires software algorithms. In this article, three lower bound calculations will be discussed, as follows: 

Priority based project scheduling is a quick and easy heuristic scheduling technique that makes use of two components to construct a resource feasible project schedule, a priority rule and a schedule generation scheme (see “Optimizing regular scheduling objectives: Priority rule based scheduling”). In this article, the use and calculations of priority rules will be illustrated on a fictitious project example network. More precisely, the calculations of activity priorities will be based on four sources of information, as follows:

Project scheduling is the act of constructing a timetable for each project activity, respecting the precedence relations and the limited availability of the renewable resources, while optimizing a predefined scheduling objective (see “Resource constrained project scheduling: What is my scheduling objective?”). The presence of resources during project scheduling often leads to a complex scheduling process and hence, simple priority based scheduling rules are used to facilitate this scheduling process.

Priority based project scheduling is a quick and easy heuristic scheduling technique that makes use of two components to construct a resource feasible project schedule, a priority rule and a schedule generation scheme (see “Optimizing regular scheduling objectives: Priority rule based scheduling”). In this article, the use of two alternative schedule generation schemes will be illustrated on a fictitious project example network, as follows: 

Project scheduling is the act of constructing a timetable for each project activity, respecting the precedence relations and the limited availability of the renewable resources, while optimizing a predefined scheduling objective (see “Resource constrained project scheduling: What is my scheduling objective?”). Although time is often considered as the dominant scheduling objective, other objectives are often crucial from a practical point-of-view. The various possible scheduling objectives can be classified in two categories, as follows:

Resource-constrained project scheduling involves the construction of an activity timetable, i.e. the determination of a start and finish time for each project activity, respecting the precedence relations and the limited availability of the renewable resources, while optimizing a predefined scheduling objective (see “Resource constrained project scheduling: What is my scheduling objective?”). In this article, the scheduling objective is assumed to be the leveling of the use of resources along the project duration.

Resource-constrained project scheduling involves the construction of an activity timetable, i.e. the determination of a start and finish time for each project activity, respecting the precedence relations and the limited availability of the renewable resources, while optimizing a predefined scheduling objective (see “Resource constrained project scheduling: What is my scheduling objective?”). In this article, the scheduling objective is assumed to be the minimization of the resource idle time of one or more bottleneck resources of the project.

Resource-constrained project scheduling involves the construction of an activity timetable, i.e. the determination of a start and finish time for each project activity, respecting the precedence relations and the limited availability of the renewable resources, while optimizing a predefined scheduling objective (see “Resource constrained project scheduling: What is my scheduling objective?”). In this article, the scheduling objective is assumed to be the maximization of the net present value of the project.