Preface

Project scheduling began as a research track within the mathematical field of Operations Research in order to determine start and finish times of project activities subject to precedence and resource constraints while optimizing a certain project objective (such as lead-time minimization, cash-flow optimization, etc.). The initial research done in the late 1950s mainly focused on network based techniques such as CPM (Critical Path Method) and PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique), which are still widely recognized as important project management tools and techniques. From this moment on, a substantial amount of research has been carried out covering various areas of project scheduling (e.g. time scheduling, resource scheduling, cost scheduling). Today, project scheduling research continues to grow in the variety of its theoretical models, in its magnitude and in its applications. While the focus of decennia of research was mainly on the static development of algorithms to deal with the complex scheduling problems, the recent research activities gradually started to focus on the development of dynamic scheduling tools that are able to respond to a higher uncertainty during the project’s progress. The topic of this book is known as dynamic scheduling and is used to refer to three dimensions of project management and scheduling: the construction of a baseline schedule and the analysis of a project schedule’s risk as preparation for the project control phase during the progress of the project. This dynamic scheduling point of view implicitly assumes that the usability of a project’s baseline schedule is rather limited and only acts as a point of reference in the project life cycle. Consequently, a project schedule should especially be considered as nothing more than a predictive model that can be used for resource efficiency calculations, time and cost risk analyses, project control and performance measurement. In all upcoming chapters, the project control phase will also be called project tracking or project monitoring. In this book, the three dimensions of dynamic scheduling are highlighted in detail and are based on and inspired by a combination of academic research studies at Ghent University (www.ugent.be), in-company trainings at Vlerick Business School (www.vlerick.com) and consultancy projects at OR-AS (www.or-as.be).