Do We Have Enough Project Data? (Part 2)

In a book about data for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem, a critical note should be made about the importance and practical use of this challenging problem for practice. Despite the importance of the research, it must also be acknowledged that the strict assumptions of this well-known scheduling problem are often not met in practice. In this chapter, these assumptions are therefore questioned, and the problem is extended so that it becomes more realistic. First, the anonymous resources of the problem are replaced by real people, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, which we summarize as people skills. Furthermore, the strict definition of the project network is extended with the possibility of including alternatives so that the flexibility of the project is increased. Finally, the project is also brought into a larger set of a portfolio so that the resources can be shared between the portfolio’s projects, making the scheduling problem even more challenging than it already was. As is appropriate in this book, new datasets are proposed for each of these more extensive scheduling problem formulations so that research can continue to work with them.