The application of project scheduling techniques in a real-life environment

Abstract

The scheduling of acitivities over time has gained increasing attention with the development of the critical path method (CPM) and the program evaluation and review technique (PERT). Since then, a large amount of solution procedures for a wide range of problem types have been proposed in literature. Many of these procedures, however, are not able to solve real-life problems. In this paper we describe a capacity expansion project at a water production center (WPC) of the Vlaamse Maatschappij voor Watervoorziening (VMW) in Belgium. This project aims at expanding the production capacity of pure water. We show that scheduling the project with certain techniques wll improve the financial status of the project. We illustrate this statement with different schedules. Keywords: project scheduling, net present value (NPV), real-life problems, CPM, PERT