16th Int'l Conference on Project Management and Scheduling
April, 17-20, 2018
Residenza di Ripetta - Via di Ripetta, 231 
Rome - Italy

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INVITED SPEAKERS
Prof.
Jacques Carlier		Prof.
Erik Demeulemmester		Prof.
Erwin Pesch		Prof.
Ruben Ruiz
Université de Technologie de Compiègne
 KU LeuvenUniversität SiegenPolytechnic University of Valencia

Comparing Event-Node Graphs with Nonrenewable Resources and Activity-Node Graphs with Renewable Resources

On the construction of optimal policies for the RCPSP with stochastic activity durations


Optimization Problems in Intermodal Transport Simple metaheuristics for Flowshop Scheduling: All you need is local search
At the end of the fifties, two main approaches were proposed to manage a large project: the PERT method and the MPM method. In both approaches the project is modelled by a graph and one has to compute critical paths. In the PERT graph, an activity is represented by an arc whenever nodes represent events. In the MPM graph, an activity is represented by a node whenever arcs represent precedence constraints. The drawback of both methods is that they do not take into account resources. The specific drawback of the event-node graph is its large size. The scheduling literature is essentially devoted to problems with renewable resources and precedence constraints, modelled by an activity-node graph. Renewable resources are allocated to activities at their starting times and released at their completion times. A machine is an example of a renewable resource. The basic problem is the Resource Constrained Project scheduling Problem (RCPSP). The aim of this talk is to rehabilitate event-node graph and nonrenewable resources. A nonrenewable resource is produced or consumed by an activity at its occurrence time. The money is an example of a nonrenewable resource. Our basic problem is the Extended Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (ERCPSP). We will present a brief review of literature on ERCPSP. We will explain that several approaches built for RCPSP can be adapted to ERCPSP. We will also report some polynomial algorithms. Next we will introduce several lower bounds and some linear programming models inspired from RCPSP ones. Finally we will report some computational results and explain why it is useful to study ERCPSP.

 The majority of publications in the extensive literature on resource-constrained project scheduling focus on a static deterministic setting for which a so-called baseline schedule is computed prior to project execution. In the real world, however, a project may be subject to considerable uncertainty. During the actual execution of a project, the baseline schedule may indeed suffer from disruptive events causing the actually realized activity start times to deviate from the predicted baseline start times. This plenary focuses on the construction of optimal policies for the RCPSP with stochastic activity durations, meaning that an optimal baseline schedule is selected as well as all optimal continuations in case a disruption occurs in the baseline schedule or in an already adapted schedule. First, we will take a look at the general case and discuss two models that are capable of constructing ‘optimal’ policies in the sense that these are optimal within the set of schedules that are considered. Next, we will consider a serial project scheduling problem of at most four activities, where the durations of the activities can take on two possible durations. For that particular case, we will construct the real optimal policies and we will infer some rules that can be useful in order to construct better schedules for the general case such that the resulting ‘optimal policies’ are improved.

In intermodal container transportation, where containers need to be transported between customers (shippers or receivers) and container terminals (rail or maritime) and vice versa, transshipment of containers is commonly arranged at the terminals. Attracting a higher share of freight traffic on rail requires freight handling in railway terminals that is more efficient, and which includes technical innovations as well as the development of suitable optimization approaches and decision-support systems. In this talk we will review some optimization problems of container processing in railway yards, and analyze basic decision problems and solution approaches for the two most important yard types: conventional rail-road and modern rail-rail transshipment yards. Furthermore, we review some of the relevant literature and identify open research challenges.
Additionally we address a container dispatching and conflict-free gantry crane routing problem that arises at a storage container block in an automated, maritime container terminal. A container block serves as an intermediate buffer for inbound and outbound containers and exchanges of containers between water- and landside of a maritime terminal. The considered block is perpendicular to the waterside and employs two rail mounted gantry cranes. Cranes may have the same or different sizes and therefore either are based at the opposite sides of the container block or can cross each other. The question arises in which order and by which crane containers are transported in order to minimize the makespan and prevent crane conflicts.		 Many scheduling problems are simply too hard to be solved exactly, especially for instances of medium or large size. As a result, the literature on heuristics and metaheuristics for scheduling is extensive. More often than not, metaheuristics are capable of generating solutions close optimality or to tight lower bounds for instances of realistic size in a matter of minutes. Metaheuristics have been refined over the years and there is literally hundreds of papers published every year with applications to most domains in many different journals. Most regrettably, some of these methods are complex in the sense that they have many parameters that affect performance and hence need careful calibration. Furthermore, many times published results are hard to reproduce due to specific speed-ups being used or complicated software constructs. These complex methods are difficult to transfer to industries in the case of scheduling problems. Another important concern is the recently recognized “tsunami” of novel metaheuristics that mimic the most bizarre natural or human processes, as for example intelligent water drops, harmony search, firefly algorithms and the like. See K. Sörensen “Metaheuristics—The Metaphor exposed” (2015), ITOR 22(1):3-18.
In this presentation, we review many different flowshop related problems. From the basic flowshop problem with makespan minimization to other objectives like flowtime minimization, tardiness, flowshops with sequence-dependent setup times, no-idle flowshops or other variants and extensions, all the way up to complex hybrid flexible flowline problems. We will show how simple Iterated Greedy (IG) algorithms often outperform much more complex approaches. IG methods are inherently simple with very few parameters. They are easy to code and results are easy to reproduce. We will show that for all tested problems so far they show state-of-the-art performance despite their simplicity. As a result, we will defend the choice of simpler, yet good performing approaches over complicated metaphor-based algorithms.


Prof.
Jacques Carlier		Jacques Carlier was born in Paris, France on 1949 September 25. He receives the degrees of Computer Science in 1972 and Mathematics in 1974, MSc (DEA) in Operations Research in 1973, PhD (Doctorat de troisième cycle) on Disjunctive Scheduling Problems in 1975 and PhD (Doctorat d’état) on Resource Constrained Project Scheduling in 1984, all from University of Paris VI. From 1974 to 1985, he was assistant-Professor at the same University. Since 1985 he is Professor at Compiègne University of Technology, emeritus since 2015. He was teaching Operations Research, Mathematics and Computer Science. His research interests concern Combinatorial Optimization and in particular scheduling problems, telecommunication networks and network reliability. During his carrier, he was the supervisor of more than 30 PhD students. His works on scheduling are well known. They include methods for the one machine sequencing problem, the m-machine scheduling problem, the job-shop, the RCPSP and the financing problem. He is member of the editorial board of EJOR and RAIRO and has published 60 papers in international journals.
Prof.
Erik Demeulemeester		 Erik Demeulemeester is Professor in the Research Center for Operations Management at the KU Leuven. He earned the degree of commercial engineer (field of Management Informatics) in 1987, the degree of Master of Business Administration in 1988 and a PhD in 1992, all from the KU Leuven. The title of the PhD was ‘Optimal algorithms for various classes of multiple resource-constrained project scheduling problems’. At present, he is Full Professor from 2001 on and currently teaches a course on project and production scheduling, a PhD course on combinatorial optimization and local search techniques as well as a seminar on production and logistics. His main research interests are situated in the field of project scheduling and health care (operating room) planning and he has published many papers on these topics.
Prof.
Erwin Pesch		Erwin Pesch studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University Darmstadt. He worked at the Commerzbank AG and later as assistant professor at the University in Maastricht (Netherlands) and as professor in the Institute of Economics of the University in Bonn. Currently, he is a full professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the University in Siegen and director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Management at the HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and a Habilitation in Business Administration. His research areas are mainly in Logistics, Scheduling and  Project Management, and Personnel Planning many of which are closely related to different industrial projects. He received a number of distinctions, e.g., the Copernicus Prize (together with J. Blazewicz) jointly awarded by the national science foundations DFG and FNP. He is author or co-author of 6 books about 200 papers in many international journals. He is area or associate editor of 13 scientific journals, has frequently been a keynote or plenary speaker at international conferences, and was responsible for the organization of the ECCO 2001 and the EURO 2009 conference in Bonn that attracted 2500 delegates.
Prof.
Ruben Ruiz		 Ruben Ruiz is a Full Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. He is co-author of more than 60 papers in International Journals and has participated in presentations of more than 150 papers in national and international conferences. He is editor of the Elsevier journal Operations Research Perspectives (ORP) and co-editor of the JCR-listed journal European Journal of Industrial Engineering (EJIE). He is also associate editor of other important journals like TOP and Applied Mathematics and Computation as well as a member of the editorial boards of several journals, most notably European Journal of Operational Research and Computers and Operations Research. He is the director of the Applied Optimization Systems Group (SOA, http://soa.iti.es) at the Instituto Tecnológico de Informática (ITI, http://www.iti.es) where he is or has been the principal investigator in several public research projects as well as privately funded projects with industrial companies. His research interests include scheduling and routing in real life scenarios.