Resource-constrained scheduling of a real project from the construction industry: A comparison of software packages for project management

Commercial software packages for project management apply proprietary, heuristic procedures for resource-constrained scheduling. We analyze the scheduling performance of seven such packages. Three of them offer the possibility to select the priority rule to be used for the resource-constrained scheduling procedure. The project duration obtained strongly depends on this rule. Some packages know several thousand priority rules; in general, it is impossible to predict which rule provides the best result for a given project. By analyzing 1560 projects of an internationally recognized benchmark library, we propose a set of three rules for each package. We apply these rules to a real project from the construction industry. For each of the three packages, the project duration obtained by this set of rules is among the best results for all available rules, and is shorter than the project duration obtained by the packages which do not offer alternative priority rules.

I. INTRODUCTION

Projects are to be managed, e.g., in a company's information technology or new product development department. A project is a one-time endeavor which is dedicated to some objective and consists of a set of activities being interrelated by precedence constraints and requiring time and resources, e.g. personnel or equipment, for execution (see, e.g., Brucker et al. [2]). The project planning task includes the computation of the early and the late start schedule and the slack times of the activities (tem-poral scheduling)and the allocation of the scarce resources over time to the execution of the activities (resource allocation). In practice, software packages are widely used for this task (cf. Herroelen [5], Liberatore and Pollack-Johnson [14], Liberatore et al. [15], and White and Fortune [23]).