Integrated Project Scheduling and Staff Assignment with Controllable Processing Times

• Main Authors: Victor Fernandez-Viagas, Jose M. Framinan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2014-01-01
• Series: The Scientific World Journal
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/924120

This paper addresses a decision problem related to simultaneously scheduling the tasks in a project and assigning the staff to these tasks, taking into account that a task can be performed only by employees with certain skills, and that the length of each task depends on the number of employees assigned. This type of problems usually appears in service companies, where both tasks scheduling and staff assignment are closely related. An integer programming model for the problem is proposed, together with some extensions to cope with different situations. Additionally, the advantages of the controllable processing times approach are compared with the fixed processing times. Due to the complexity of the integrated model, a simple GRASP algorithm is implemented in order to obtain good, approximate solutions in short computation times.