Project Scheduling is concerned with the allocation of scarce resources over time. The rich optimisation models with time windows that are treated in this book cover a multitude of practical decision problems arising in diverse application areas such as construction engineering or make-to-order production planning.
The book shows how Constraint Propagation techniques from Artificial Intelligence can be successfully combined with Operations Research methods for developing powerful exact and heuristic solution algorithms for a very general class of scheduling problems. Example applications demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. 1 Introduction.- 1.1 Motivation and Objectives.- 1.2 Outline.- 2. Optimisation Model.- 2.1 The General Single-Mode Model.- 2.2 Extension to Multiple Execution Modes.- 3 Constraint Propagation.- 3.1 Constraint Satisfaction and Optimisation.- 3.2 Concepts of Consistency.- 3.3 Consistency Checking.- 3.4 Constraint Programming.- 4 Consistency Tests.- 4.1 Basic Concepts.- 4.2 Consistency Tests for Temporal Constraints.- 4.3 Interval Consistency.- 4.4 Disjunctive Sub-Problems.- 4.5 Disjunctive Interval Consistency Tests.- 4.6 Cumulative Interval Consistency Tests.- 4.7 Multi-Mode Consistency Tests.- 4.8 Summary.- 5 A Branch-and-Bound Algorithm.- 5.1 Previous Solution Approaches.- 5.2 Constraint Propagation.- 5.3 The Branch-and-Bound Algorithm.- 5.4 Computational Experiments.- 5.5 Summary.- 6 Multi-Mode Extension of the Branch-and-Bound Algorithm.- 6.1 Previous Work.- 6.2 Constraint Propagation.- 6.3 Extended Branching Scheme.- 7 Applications in Airport Operations Management.- 7.1 Scheduling of Ground Handling Operations.- 7.2 Gate Scheduling.- 8 Summary and Conclusions.- List of Figures.- List of Tables.- List of Symbols.- References.
