Integrated multi-resource planning and scheduling in engineering project

Abstract

Planning and scheduling processes in project management are carried out sequentially in practice, i.e. planning project activities first without visibility of resource limitation, and then scheduling the project according to these pre-planned activities. This is a need to integrate these two processes. In this paper, we use Branch and Bound approach for generating all the feasible and non-feasible project schedules with/without activity splitting, and with a new criterion called "the Minimum Moments of Resources Required around X-Y axes (MMORR)", we select the best feasible project schedule to integrate plan processing and schedule processing for engineering projects. The results illustrate that this integrated approach can effectively select the best feasible project schedule among alternatives, improves the resource utilization, and shortens the project lead time.