Assignment

Q1. All of the following questions relate to the 63-variable network described in Sonmez and Bettemir 2012.

a. Schedule the network using MS Project (or another software of your choice), and calculate the costs for shortest and longest project duration for the given time-cost pairs.

b. Describe the optimization process outlined in the article and discuss its benefits and potential shortcomings.

c. Based on this article and rest of your independent research, discuss the two main schedule compression methods, crashing and fast-tracking. Your analysis, at a minimum, should encompass data availability, technical requirements of the analysis, potential implementation issues, exposure to risk etc.

Q2. Discuss the approaches to scheduling with and without resource constraints. Your analysis should be supported by external readings (the readings for the unit are a good starting point), and your own analysis of different case studies of benchmark networks that are described in the literature. Some of your discussions should entail the following:

a. How are resources included in scheduling process (i.e. think about resources vs constraints)?

b. What is resource constrained scheduling?

c. What is resource levelling?

d. What are some of the issues in applying these principles to actual projects?

Reference - Sonmez, R., & Bettemir, Ö. H. (10/2012). A hybrid genetic algorithm for the discrete time-cost trade-off problem. Expert Systems with Applications, 39(13), 11428-11434.