Project Scheduling with Time Windows From Theory to Applications

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.