Kinematic Model for Project Scheduling with Constrained Resources Under Uncertainties

Abstract

Project management practitioners and researchers recognize that the project scheduling efforts are made based on information with many uncertainties and in an environment with constrained resources. This chapter presents the kinematic model named as Coupled Estimate Technique for project scheduling with constrained resources under uncertainties. The Coupled Estimate Technique provides tools of analytical analysis, given that the modelled duration depends on the planned duration and on the resource variability (aleatory uncertainty), as well as the modelled resource depends on the planned resource and on the duration variability (aleatory uncertainty), and also provides tools of graphical analysis, given that the durations and resources of activities, work packages or phases of the project are represented in the bidimensional graphics. In developing the mathematical formulation of the Coupled Estimate Technique, the project precedence diagram was considered as a kinematic chain of robotic manipulators, which may be in chain configuration open (serial), closed (parallel) and/or hybrid. This chapter describes the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) under uncertainties, identifies the limitations and opportunities in the previous work on planning under uncertainties and presents the fundamentals and method of the kinematic model for project scheduling with constrained resources under uncertainties along with a short example of implementation