Development of a Project Planning Software Incorporating Resource-Constrained Scheduling & Project Crashing

Abstract

Large engineering projects are usually very complex and huge capitals are at stake. Currently no efficient methods exist to crash, or shorten, such projects under the precedence and resource constraints, because resource-constrained project scheduling problems alone are NP-hard and only problems of small instances are solvable. We survey several project scheduling techniques and models in this thesis and present two innovative approaches to solve such problems: a special formulation of the resource constraints for possible overlapping activities and a heuristic to crash the resource-constrained projects. The former is suitable for projects of more linear form with few parallel activities, whereas the latter is demonstrated to be capable of dealing with projects of relatively large size, e.g. 60 activities. Further modification may be made to enhance the heuristic to handle even larger project.