Planning projects with scarce resources: Yesterday, today and tomorrow's research challenges

Abstract

This paper is an invited request to describe the main research challenges in the domain of resourceconstrained project scheduling. The paper is split up in three parts. In today's challenges, research endeavors that have received a significant, but still not enough, attention have been described. In tomorrow's research challenges, some promising research avenues for future research have been given. Finally, in yesterday's challenge, a research topic that started decades ago, is said to have still a huge potential in tomorrow's research agenda. This paper does not intend to give a full literature overview, nor a summary of all possible research paths. Instead, it is inspired from the author's experience in academic research and practical consultancy and it serves as a personal opinion on a nonexhaustive set of promising research avenues, rather than giving a full literature-based advice for future research directions.

Resource planning of Chinese commercial banking systems using two-stage inverse data envelopment analysis with undesirable outputs

“…For instance, our approaches can be applied to DMUs with variable returns to scale. The structure of DMUs can also be extended to highly complex networks [56]. However, this paper ignores the efficiency of sub-stages, and future studies may consider keeping both the overall and sub-stage efficiencies invariable.…”

Hierarchical Task Network Approach for Time and Budget Constrained Construction Project Planning

“…have been adopted to automatically generate construction plans. A great deal of research efforts have also been made to optimize the construction schedules by reasonably arranging time and resources based on the given activity network (Faghihi, Nejat, Reinschmidt, & Kang, 2015;Vanhoucke, 2018;Zhou, Love, Wang, Teo, & Irani, 2013). While much progress has been made in automating the development of construction plans, many existing approaches performed limited ability of constraint reasoning to verify whether the construction plan satisfies the time and cost constraints.…”