Mathematical Programming and Financial Objectives for Scheduling Projects focuses on decision problems where the performance is measured in terms of money. As the title suggests, special attention is paid to financial objectives and the relationship of financial objectives to project schedules and scheduling. In addition, how schedules relate to other decisions is treated in detail. The book demonstrates that scheduling must be combined with project selection and financing, and that scheduling helps to give an answer to the planning issue of the amount of resources required for a project. The author makes clear the relevance of scheduling to cutting budget costs. The book is divided into six parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to project management. Part two examines scheduling projects in order to maximize their net present value. Part three considers capital rationing. Many decisions on selecting or rejecting a project cannot be made in isolation and multiple projects must be taken fully into account. Since the requests for capital resources depend on the schedules of the projects, scheduling taken on more complexity. Part four studies the resource usage of a project in greater detail. Part five discusses cases where the processing time of an activity is a decision to be made. Part six summarizes the main results that have been accomplished.

Inhalt

Part I: General Issues. 1. Focus. 2. Modeling Projects. Part II: The Net Present Value. 3. Central Problem. 4. Resource-Constrained Scheduling. 5. Network Decomposition. 6. Relaxation of Resource Constraints. 7. Computational Studies. Part III: Capital Budgeting. 8. Capital Rationing. 9. Budget Elimination. 10. Computational Studies. Part IV: Providing Resources. 11. Resource Leveling. 12. Optimization Guided Scheduling I. 13. Optimization Guided Scheduling II. 14. Computational Studies. Part V: Time-Cost Tradeoffs. 15. Crashing. 16. Preprocessing. 17. Network Decomposition. 18. Computational Studies. Part VI: Summary. 19. Concluding Remarks. 20. Future work. Index.