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R&D project scheduling when activities may fail

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De Reyck, Bert [UCL] Leus, Roel [UCL]

An R&D project typically consists of several stages. Due to technological risks, the project may have to be terminated before completion, each stage having a specific likelihood of success. In the project planning and scheduling literature, this technological uncertainty has typically been ignored and project plans are developed only for scenarios in which the project succeeds. In this paper we examine how to schedule projects in order to maximize their expected net p resent value when the project activities have a probability of failure and when an activity's failure leads to overall project termination. We formulate the problem, show that it is NP-hard, develop a A branch-and-bound algorithm that allows us to obtain optimal solutions and provide extensive computational results. In the process, we establish a complexity result for an open problem in single-machine scheduling, namely for the discounted weighted-completion-time objective with general precedence constraints.

Document type Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type Accès restreint
Publication date 2008
Language Anglais
Journal information "IIE Transactions : industrial engineering research & development" - Vol. 40, no. 4, p. 367-384 (2008)
Peer reviewed yes
Publisher Taylor & Francis Inc (Philadelphia)
issn 0740-817X
e-issn 1545-8830
Publication status Publié
Affiliation UCL
Keywords project management ; scheduling ; risk ; research and development ; analysis of algorithms ; computational complexity
Links
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Bibliographic reference De Reyck, Bert ; Leus, Roel. R&D project scheduling when activities may fail. In: IIE Transactions : industrial engineering research & development, Vol. 40, no. 4, p. 367-384 (2008)
Permanent URL http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/36987