Reactive project scheduling: minimizing delays in the completion times of projects

Abstract

Projects are delayed due to so many reasons. Salient amongst these reasons, in our opinion, is lack of proper planning before the commencement of the project. Many methods exist for the minimization of the completion times of projects. Some methods formulate the problem as resource-constrained project-scheduling problems (RCPSPs) and minimization of project completion time as objective. They find the minimal schedule that minimizes the total completion time of a project while satisfying the precedence and the resource constraints. The basic RCPSP assumes that the renewable resources are periodically renewed and their limited amount can vary from one period to another. The variability of available resource reflects real-life situations. Therefore, with added assumptions to the basic RCPSP, this work proposes a model called hybrid-RCPSP to solve delays in projects. Experimentally, two project examples were used to validate our solution method and it was shown that no matter how small the provided amount for each period, the projects were not unnecessarily delayed.