STOCHASTIC PROJECT NETWORKS: TEMPORAL ANALYSIS, SCHEDULING AND COST MINIMIZATION

Project planning, scheduling, and control are regularly used in business and the service sector of an economy to accomplish outcomes with limited resources under critical time constraints. To aid in solving these problems, network-based planning methods have been developed that now exist in a wide variety of forms, cf. Elmaghraby (1977) and Moder et al. (1983). The so-called "classical" project networks, which are used in the network techniques CPM and PERT and which represent acyclic weighted directed graphs, are able to describe only projects whose evolution in time is uniquely specified in advance. Here every event of the project is realized exactly once during a single project execution and it is not possible to return to activities previously carried out (that is, no feedback is permitted). Many practical projects, however, do not meet those conditions. Consider, for example, a production process where some parts produced by a machine may be poorly manufactured. If an inspection shows that a part does not conform to certain specifications, it must be repaired or replaced by a new item. This means that we have to return to a preceding stage of the production process. In other words, there is feedback. Note that the result of the inspection is that a certain percentage of the parts tested do not conform. That is, there is a positive probability (strictly less than 1) that any part is defective.

From the reviews of the second edition:

"The book deals with so-called temporal project scheduling with schedule-dependent time windows. ... Overall, the book has produced a fairly comprehensive and well-organized treatment of these topics. ... the authors have done a terrific job of binding them–including many of their own contributions–together in a coherent way. ... Their well- grounded choices make the technical details easier to follow. ... As such, the book represents a noteworthy addition to project-scheduling reference list for both academicians and practitioners alike." (J Xue, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 56, 2005)

"The book presents a state of the art in the sub-field of scheduling theory, i.e. the project scheduling under scarce resources written by well known experts in the field. Although several books have been recently published in that area, one can observe a number of features which distinguish this book from the others. ... The book is thoroughly written and the mathematics used is adequate to the needs. It contains also many algorithms described in pseudo-code. Several examples complement nicely their presentation." (Jacek Blazewicz, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1059 (10), 2005)

"The book presents the state of the art of deterministic resource-constrained project scheduling with time windows. ... A thorough structural analysis of the feasible region of project scheduling problems and a classification and detailed investigation of objective functions are performed, which can be exploited for developing efficient exact and heuristic solution methods. New interesting applications of project scheduling to production and operations management as well as investment projects are discussed." (GfPMagazin – online, April, 2005)

"At last a professional book dealing with the exact formulation of project scheduling. When I obtained it I first couldn’t believe that there is really a book with definitions, propositions, proofs, lemmas and theorems about how to schedule activities with the metra potential method. Fortunately, there are also a lot of examples and concrete algorithms that describe simple scheduling tasks as well as schedule-improvement procedures. ... The book is truly scientific, you find e.g. a comprehensive list of references of more than 200 scientific publications." (Dr. Georg Angermeier, www.projektmagazin.de, August, 2004)