Hello Hassan, that is a very interesting topic and certainly a challenge to be overcome.

Before we start looking for tools and solutions, something that we should really pay attention is to describe well the real-life production environment. You have done that so well. For example, some features need to be clear:

1-Demand Pattern: (make to order engineer to order, make-to stock, etc..)

2-Production volume (low, high..)

3-Production frequency (low repetitive, high.)

4-Services (high customized, low ..)

5-Production mix (high unstable, stable, ..)

6-Lead times (low, high)

7-Resources layout (cells, Functional, ...)

It has been well done by you as far as I am concerned based on your nice Article. Your problem is well formulated. If we know well what we have in hands, it will make less difficult to end up having a suitable solution. What we have seen so far between Literature and reality is a big gap in my opinion and I guess you can feel the same. A lot of times, papers related to topics in scheduling and project planning have not been clarified properly what problem is, instead the tool, algorithm have received much attention. In my opinion, it is like to say, it does not matter the patient's disease, I love my medicine and that's it, I will take that.

My experience is in the manufacturing sector developing solution for production planning and logistic. My research topic will be taking advantage of some aspects of this experience. I will develop a simulation package specifically to solve conflicts in projects. It will be web based to make easier for any stakeholder and it can run in a simple mobile device. A balance between production engineering and system engineering is clear in my mind.

What I have been working is targeted for short-term planning (days or weeks), as opposed to mid-term (1-2 years) or long term (2-5 years) planning. It is primarily intended to assist project managers with day-to-day operations. It does not replace managers; instead, it provides them tools to manage better. The proposed approach will fundamentally change the way projects are planned and controlled in the ship repair industry primarily. The idea is to manage well the resources considering time, cost, precedence, resources constraints simultaneously providing outputs such as feasible schedule, cost , etc as opposed to construct a schedule not taking care of resources capacity, indeed those that are shared with different tasks.

If you think that what I have said makes sense for you, we can have further discussion as you wish.  Feel free to contact me if want.  Take care Hassan, have a  good day. Denis

Hi Denis,

I indeed agree with you. The focus of research shall align with real life challenges. I am a construction practitioner, I work in the industry and it is obvious that there is a considerable misalignment between research and industry.

It will be a pleasure to have a discussion and possibly collaboration; if we have an aligned research views.

Regards,

Hassan

There is a vast academic literature on project scheduling, which goes way beyond the old classical techniques, such as CPM and PERT.  Try doing a web search for "Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling".  There are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of papers on it.  (Of course, I don't know if any of those papers address the specific problem that you have in mind.)

Hi Adam,

I really appreciate your feedback. I agree that there are hundreds of papers published to optimize construction project schedules. However, I am investigating a customized construction framework to select the most appropriate scheduling methodology in addition to dynamic scheduling which requires further research within the construction industry.

I added my paper Some Considerations about Real Time Multiprocessor Operating Systems and I hope it may help.