Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects

By Robert Klein

Book Overview

Project management has become a widespread instrument enabling organizations to efficiently master the challenges of steadily shortening product life cycles, global markets and decreasing profit margins. With projects increasing in size and complexity, their planning and control represents one of the most crucial management tasks. This is especially true for scheduling, which is concerned with establishing execution dates for the sub-activities to be performed in order to complete the project. The ability to manage projects where resources must be allocated between concurrent projects or even sub-activities of a single project requires the use of commercial project management software packages. However, the results yielded by the solution procedures included are often rather unsatisfactory. Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects develops more efficient procedures, which can easily be integrated into software packages by incorporated programming languages, and thus should be of great interest for practitioners as well as scientists working in the field of project management. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the project management process is described and the management tasks to be accomplished during project planning and control are discussed. This allows for identifying the major scheduling problems arising in the planning process, among which the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is the most important. Part II deals with efficient computer-based procedures for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem and its generalized version. Since both problems are NP-hard, the development of such procedures which yield satisfactory solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time is very challenging, and a number of new and very promising approaches are introduced. This includes heuristic procedures based on priority rules and tabu search as well as lower bound methods and branch and bound procedures which can be applied for computing optimal solutions.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1461370930
• ISBN13: 9781461370932
• Release Date: October 2012
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 369 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

One step beyond MS Project -- competing, limited resources

Robert Klein’s Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects stands as a rigorous and comprehensive contribution to the field of project management and operations research. Targeted at both practitioners and academics, this volume delves into one of the most challenging aspects of project planning: efficiently scheduling activities under strict resource limitations. The book is thoughtfully structured in two distinct parts. Part I provides a solid foundation by outlining the project management lifecycle and identifying core scheduling challenges, with particular emphasis on the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as the central issue. This section effectively bridges practical management concerns with formal problem definition, making it accessible to readers with a managerial background while laying the groundwork for deeper technical exploration. Part II is where the book truly excels, offering a detailed examination of advanced computational procedures for solving RCPSP and its generalized forms (GRCPSP). Recognizing that these problems are NP-hard, Klein focuses on developing practical solution methods that balance computational efficiency with solution quality. The text presents a well-rounded toolkit, including: Heuristic approaches based on priority rules and tabu search for quickly generating good-quality schedules. Exact methods such as branch and bound and lower bounding techniques, crucial for computing optimal solutions and benchmarking heuristics. Dominance and reduction rules that enhance the performance of exact algorithms. One of the book’s key strengths is its practical orientation. Klein emphasizes procedures that can be integrated into commercial project management software via embedded programming languages, ensuring relevance for real-world applications. This focus on implementability makes the work highly valuable for software developers and consultants in the project management domain. While the mathematical depth may be challenging for beginners, the clarity of exposition and logical progression make it a definitive reference for graduate students, researchers, and professionals in operations research, computer science, and industrial engineering. For mathematician with programming skills, the author provides sufficient details to write a solution to your problem. For persons concerned about the cost, the book price is 90% off after school terms, and ebooks/etitles are available on the WWW after some diligent searching.