Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Technology, Engineering, Manufacturing, Operations Research & Management Science, Engineering, proactive/reactive project scheduling, stochastic resource breakdowns, STABILITY, SUBJECT, 0102 Applied Mathematics, 0103 Numerical and Computational Mathematics, 1503 Business and Management, Operations Research, 3507 Strategy, management and organisational behaviour, 4901 Applied mathematics

Abstract:

Research concerning project planning under uncertainty has primarily focused on the stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling problem (stochastic RCPSP), an extension of the basic RCPSP, in which the assumption of deterministic activity durations is dropped. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of the RCPSP for which the uncertainty is modeled by means of resource availabilities that are subject to unforeseen breakdowns. Our objective is to build a robust schedule that meets the project deadline and minimizes the schedule instability cost, defined as the expected weighted sum of the absolute deviations between the planned and the actually realized activity starting times during project execution. We describe how stochastic resource breakdowns can be modeled, which reaction is recommended when a resource infeasibility occurs due to a breakdown and how one can protect the initial schedule from the adverse effects of potential breakdowns. An extensive computational experiment is used to show the relative performance of the proposed proactive and reactive strategies. It is shown that protection of the baseline schedule coupled with intelligent schedule recovery yields significant performance gains over the use of deterministic scheduling approaches in a stochastic setting.