Timeslack-Based Techniques for Generating Robust Project Schedules Subject to Resource Uncertainty

The classical, deterministic resource-constrained project schedul- ing problem has been the subject of a great deal of research during the previous decades. This is not surprising given the high practi- cal relevance of this scheduling problem. Nevertheless, extensions are needed to be better able to cope with situations arising in practice such as multiple activity execution modes, activity duration changes and resource breakdowns. In this paper we analytically determine the This research has been supported by project OT/03/14 of the Research Fund of K.U.Leuven, project G.0109.04 of the Research Programme of the Fund for Scientific Re- search - Flanders (Belgium) (F.W.O.-Vlaanderen) and project NB/06/06 of the National Bank of Belgium. Corresponding author.,Tel: +32-16-326970; fax: +32-16-326732; e-mail: willy.herroelen@econ.kuleuven.be 1 impact of unexpected resource breakdowns on activity durations. Fur- thermore, using this information we develop an approach for inserting explicit idle time into the project schedule in order to protect it as well as possible from disruptions caused by resource unavailabilities.