Resource constrained project scheduling with multiple objectives: A decision support approach

Over the past 30 years, various formulations of the project scheduling problem have been proposed. Traditionally, the managerial focus of most project scheduling formulations has been on the single objective of minimizing project completion time. Other relevant factors which legitimately should be included as an objective, such as physical, financial, and human resources, have either been assumed to be available in plentiful quantities, or have been accounted for in the form of rigid resource constraints. In this paper, an interactive decision support approach is introduced for explicitly considering multiple factors, simultaneously, in a multiobjective decision making framework. The approach enhances the traditional project scheduling framework in that it allows the decision maker to examine the minimization of project completion time as well as the balancing of available resources. The approach thus makes the decision process for the project scheduling problem more flexible because various tradeoffs between project completion time and resource requirements can be evaluated. The decision support framework employs an interactive procedure based on vector maximization. Use of the method is illustrated with an example, and results from the example are compared with traditional single objective mathematical programming, preemptive goal programming, and Archemedian goal programming.