Performance Robust Project Scheduling Polices for Naval Ship Maintenance

Abstract

The research presented in this thesis concentrates on robust project scheduling for resource and time-constrained naval maintenance projects. In the naval maintenance environment, and many other real world cases, project information is subject to considerable uncertainty and a deterministic baseline schedule quickly becomes unachievable. To limit the effect of these unexpected but inevitable schedule disruptions, scheduled resource buffers are used to absorb the changes and protect schedule quality.

A linear programming model is developed and used to evaluate the effectiveness of time and resource buffers in improving schedule stability, and ways these buffers can be implemented in maintenance schedules to provide the best overall schedule adherence. The model incorporates the effects of activity crashing decisions to represent time-quality trade-offs.

Experimental results show that periodic buffers provide better stability than no buffers and that buffers positioned around the longest activities with the most resource demands provide the best schedule adherence.