Since around 1900, when Henry L. Gantt, a management scientist, developed a system of bar charts to graphically represent work on a time scale, project management tools have been used by project managers to assist with planning, scheduling, forecasting and controlling. In order to derive the most benefit from using a project management tool, it is necessary to define how a tool’s application is...

This is the Second Year Progress Report for the “Algorithms for Packing and Scheduling” Ph.D. project. In this report, we give the aims of the project, a summary of the current results obtained, we address the questions raised in the Postgraduate Workshop, and we conclude with possible future work and a timetabled research plan. The project is concerned with the study, design, and analysis, of ...

Project planning functions are to establish project activities, their logical relationships and interrelationships to each other, and the sequences in which they are to be accomplished. The process of assigning activities' duration and identifying the start and completion times of activities and project is considered as project scheduling. Project planning and scheduling is one of the most impo...

A general formulation of the single machine scheduling problem with fuzzy parameters is proposed. Such notions as schedule, cost function and precedence relation are defined. The concept of f regular cost function is introduced and several properties of the class of problems with f -regular cost function are shown.

The intrinsic and pervasive uncertainty of the real world causes unforeseen disturbances during the execution of plans. The continuous adaptation of existing schedules is necessary in response to the corresponding disruptions. Affected Operations Rescheduling (AOR) and Matchup Scheduling (MUP) have proven to be efficient techniques for this purpose, as they take only a subset of future activiti...

Nursing staff is principally cyclically scheduled in various hospitals in Belgium. The employed cyclic schedules embody, however, only a weak reflection of the ultimate nurse rosters constructed for a specific month. In this paper we investigate the benefits of integrating nurse-specific characteristics in the cyclic scheduling approach. Moreover, we analyze to what extent these characteristics...

Staff scheduling and rostering problems, with application in several application areas, from transportation systems to hospitals, have been widely addressed by researchers. This is not the case of hospitality services, which have been forgotten by the quantitative research literature. The purpose of this paper is to provide some insights on the application of staff scheduling and rostering prob...

Resource allocation optimization is a typical cloud project scheduling problem: a problem that limits a cloud system’s ability to execute and deliver a project as originally planned. The entropy, as a measure of the degree of disorder in a system, is an indicator of a system’s tendency to progress out of order and into a chaotic condition, and it can thus serve to measure a cloud system’s relia...

Due to the uncertainty of software processes, statistic based schedule estimation and stochastic project scheduling both play significant roles in software project management. However, most current work investigates them independently without an integrated process to achieve on-time delivery for software development organisations. For such an issue, this paper proposes a two-stage probabilistic...

The understanding of what constitutes a ‘‘good’’ production schedule is central to the development and evaluation of automated scheduling systems and their implementation in real-world factories. In this paper, we provide a definition of a schedule and discuss potential uses for a schedule within the organization. We then describe a number of different considerations that must be taken into acc...