Stochastic Resource-constrained Project Scheduling

PREFACE After having received my diploma from the Technische Universität Berlin in 1996, Rolf Möhring, the supervisor of my diploma thesis, offered me a research position in his group. At that time I was employed at a Berlin software company the head of which, Gert Scheschonk, strongly encouraged me to accept the offer. I accepted and in 1997 I began to work within a research initiative funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG. The members engaged in this initiative belong to five research groups in Germany which are located at universities in Bonn, Karlsruhe, Kiel, Osnabrück, and Berlin. In Berlin, the scope of the project was to develop algorithms and theory for stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling problems which is the main topic of this thesis. I am thankful to Rolf Möhring for his support, his encouragement, and the supervision of my thesis. In particular, I greatly benefited from his guidance during my work on AND/OR precedence constraints and scheduling policies. My special thanks go to my colleagues Martin Skutella and Marc Uetz. Martin greatly helped to establish, generalize, and improve many of my original considerations on AND/OR precedence constraints which finally led to the results presented in Chapters 2 and 3. The continuous fruitful discussion with Marc led to new insights in the field of deterministic resource-constrained project scheduling. The results presented in Chapter 4 on different representations of resource constraints are one example of this productive collaboration. I am also very grateful to my colleagues Andreas Schulz and Matthias Müller-Hannemann. I gained a lot from Andreas' expertise and his co-authorship in papers on deterministic project scheduling (which are not part of this thesis). My former roommate Matthias was always willing to interrupt his work in order to discuss the questions I raised. I would also like to mention the fruitful collaboration with the other members of the DFG research initiative on resource-constrained project scheduling. In particular , I thank Peter Brucker for the willingness to serve as a member of my thesis committee. Some parts of this thesis rely on software implementations that would not have reached the current quality without the support of Ewgenij Gawrilow. I thank him for introducing me to the concept of generic programming; he had a great share in establishing the basis of our programming environment, a collection of fundamental scheduling algorithms and data structures. for their careful proofreading of different parts of the manuscript. …