EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1911. A Two-Stage Approach for Workload-Balanced Scheduling of Resource-Constrained Projects

Invited abstract in session MA-12: Mathematical Programming in Project Scheduling , stream Scheduling and Project Management.

Monday, 8:30-10:00
Room: Clarendon SR 1.02

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Loris Trotter
Department of Business Administration, University of Bern
2. Nina Ackermann
Department of Business Administration, University of Bern
3. Tamara Bigler
University of Bern
4. Norbert Trautmann
Department of Business Administration, University of Bern

Abstract

In project management, the determination of an appropriate schedule for the project is a pivotal task. To reduce the project’s time to market, project scheduling models often aim to minimize the project duration while considering scarce resources and precedence relations among the project’s activities. Project resources typically comprise specialized teams, for which ensuring a balanced workload is essential to maintain team productivity and cohesion. Therefore, in addition to minimizing the project duration, we consider a balanced workload as an additional criterion in project scheduling. In contrast to other areas of operations research, such as machine scheduling, workload balancing has not been extensively discussed in the literature on project scheduling. We present a novel two-stage successive goal programming approach, which minimizes the project duration in the first stage and optimizes the workload balance in the second stage. An experimental computational analysis indicates that with the novel approach, the workload balance in project schedules can be improved considerably without increasing the project duration.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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