Visual planning and scheduling of industrial projects with spatial factors

Abstract

With the increasing complexity and scale of industrial projects the need of comprehensive and trustworthy methods for planning and scheduling becomes more and more apparent. Being implemented in recent project management systems, the traditional methods aid in project scheduling based on activity durations, precedence relationships, explicit timing constraints, and resource limits all assumed by Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). However, the methods have many shortcomings for the industrial projects where spatial factors play critically important role. The objective of this paper is to present an advanced Visual Scheduling Method (VSM) for solving Generally Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (GCPSP) that extends the classical RCPSP statement by taking into account additional spatial factors such as product element collisions, missing of supporting neighbouring elements, workspace congestion. In the paper we provide a holistic framework of the method as well as illustrate how feasible project schedules can be generated under complex spatio-temporal constraints in highly automatic and visually interpretable way. A software implementation of the method and its prospects for application in industrial practice are discussed too.