Do We Have Enough Project Data? (Part 1)

Since the dawn of academic research into the resource-constrained project scheduling problem, researchers have made various attempts to generate artificial project data under a structured design. Using different project network generators, several project databases were created to provide a complete representation of all potential projects that can exist. In this chapter, the quest for such complete project databases is described by comparing different generators and measuring the diversity of their generated projects. It is also shown that project diversity has a positive impact on the algorithms’ ability to predict the complexity of a specific project. This chapter is based on the article “An evaluation of the adequacy of project network generators with systematically sampled networks,” published in European Journal of Operational Research.