Framework for multi-project scheduling in product development based on available data

Abstract

The amount of development projects in companies rises, increasing the difficulty to plan and schedule new projects since the complexity increases when the same human resources are used in a larger amount of projects. This can lead to more interdependencies between the projects and sometimes overload of the existing resources. With more interdependencies, changes in one project also affect other projects leading to more development projects missing their project objectives such as cost and/or time. Multi project management and scheduling addresses this circumstances by scheduling the resources with regard to the overall multi project environment. Although most scheduling approaches in the industry only consider resource availability on a multi-project view, while cost and time are optimized within the projects. The Resourceconstrained multi-project scheduling problem (RCMPSP) is in the scientific literature is widely researched and is concerned with the overall optimization of resource scheduling. These existing solutions for a mathematical optimization approach in resource scheduling, are rarely utilized in the industry. This paper focuses on building a framework to reduce the gap between industry and research. On the one hand, the paper analyses the requirements for project scheduling in corporate practice. On the other hand, a structured overview of the RCMPSP literature is provided from which requirements for the needed data is derived. The framework then matches the scheduling needs and existing data within a company to the research landscape of existing optimization solutions in order to support the use of resource scheduling in multiple projects.