European Journal of Operational Research 165 (2005) 285–288
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Editorial
Project management and scheduling
The EURO Working Group on Project Man-
agement and Scheduling (WG-PMS) was estab-
lished in 1986, with the aim of assessing the state-
of-the-art and stimulating progress in both theory
and practice within the area. To achieve these
goals, the decision was made to organize work-
shops every two years. The Eighth International
Workshop on Project Management and Schedul-
ing was held in Valencia (Spain), April 3–5, 2002,
and was hosted by the Department of Financial
and Mathematical Economics and the Depart-
ment of Statistics and Operational Research
of the University of Valencia. The proceedings
book contains extended abstracts of all 94 papers
accepted by the program committee. These papers
were clustered for presentation into 26 ses-
sions scheduled in three parallel streams. Broadly
speaking, the streams correspond to Project
Management, Machine Scheduling, and Applica-
tions.
This feature issue contains 20 papers that were
presented at the Workshop, and accepted for
publication after a careful reviewing process. We
would like to express our gratitude to all the
reviewers for their invaluable efforts allowing us to
select a set of high-quality contributions.
The first three papers address the issue of
scheduling under uncertainty. The project sched-
uling literature largely concentrates on the gener-
ation of an optimal (or near optimal) schedule for
problems arising in project planning and control
that assume complete information and a static
deterministic environment within which the pre-
computed baseline schedule will be executed.
However, uncertainty lies at the very heart of real-
0377-2217/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2004.04.001
life project management, and thus the literature on
project scheduling under risk and uncertainty is
witnessing a recent explosion.
Herroelen and Leus in their invited review
overview fundamental approaches for scheduling
under uncertainty––many of which have been
mainly or solely studied in a machine scheduling
environment––and discuss the potentials of these
approaches for scheduling under uncertainty pro-
jects with deterministic network evolution structure.
Elmaghraby delivers a stimulating and insight-
ful discussion on the issue of uncertainty in project
management, especially when dealing with the risk
inherent in the estimates relative to cost and time.
Based on a project scheduling problem with sto-
chastic activity work contents, the paper exempli-
fies the prejudicial consequences that are incurred
in project control when random variables are
substituted into their expected values.
Introducing flexibility in the schedule determi-
nation phase is an approach proposed by Artigues,
Billaut, and Esswein to cope with uncertainty in a
general shop floor scheduling setting with release
dates and deadlines. The flexibility is provided by
generating a family of schedules instead of a un-
ique one, so that the decision-maker can switch
from one solution to another in case of disrup-
tions. A family of schedules is represented by
defining for each machine a sequence of groups of
operations, where the operations within a group
are totally permutable. The generation and eval-
uation of families of schedules, the maximization
of flexibility criteria and the impact of grouping
operations on the makespan value are some of the
issues dealt with in the paper.
286 Editorial / European Journal of Operational Research 165 (2005) 285–288
The next four papers are devoted to project
management. In medium to large-scale projects, it
is quite common for the project owner, lacking the
technical skills in a number of areas that the pro-
ject execution may call for, to subcontract some or
all of the project activities to one or more spe-
cialists. Under these circumstances, a bidding
mechanism is often the preferred price-setting
mechanism. Paul and Gutierrez approach, from
the point of view of the project owner, the process
of price setting using sealed bids. They use a par-
simonious stochastic model to compare the ex-
pected price fetched by three commonly used
contract forms: Fixed Price, Cost Plus and an
intermediate type of contract that they call a Menu
contract. The impact of risk aversion and collusion
on the average winning bid price is also analysed.
In project management, the project duration
can often be compressed by accelerating some of
its activities at an additional expense. This is the
so-called time-cost trade-off problem (TCTP).
Next two papers consider different versions of this
problem.
The paper by Akkan, Drexl, and Kimms pro-
vides lower and upper bounds for the discrete
version of the problem (DTCTP) using column
generation techniques based on network decom-
position. A computational study is provided to
demonstrate that the presented bounds are tight
and that large and hard instances can be solved in
short run-time.
Recently, time-switch constraints have been
introduced into the discrete time/cost trade-off
problem in order to cope with day, night and
weekend shifts. Basically, these constraints impose
a specified starting time on the project activities
and force them to be inactive during specified time
periods. Vanhoucke proposes a new branch-and-
bound algorithm for the DTCTP with time-switch
constraints that outperforms previous results.
In the context of the resource-constrained pro-
ject scheduling problem (RCPSP), Valls, Ballest
ın,
and Quintanilla propose the double justification as
a technique able to improve the quality of solu-
tions obtained by other methods. By incorporating
double justification into 22 diverse heuristic algo-
rithms, they show that justification is a simple
technique that can be incorporated easily into di-
verse algorithms and produces notable improve-
ments in the quality of the schedules with a small,
and generally favourable, change in computing
time. Their main conclusion is that double justifi-
cation should always be considered when design-
ing an algorithm for the RCPSP.
A group of five papers are clustered around the
study of the computational complexity of different
machine scheduling problems. Sevastianov pro-
poses a novel complexity analysis of discrete
problems, multi-parameter complexity analysis,
which consists in establishing the complexity of the
various sub-problems of a given problem whose
intractability has been determined. The sub-prob-
lems are specified by combinations of constraints
on key problem parameters. Since the number of
sub-problems may be infinite, the author intro-
duces and studies the concept of a basis system of
sub-problems, a minimum cardinality set of sub-
problems such that the determination of their
complexities would be sufficient to determine the
complexity of any other sub-problem.
The new ideas and theoretical results presented
in the paper are illustrated with the application of
multi-parameter complexity analysis to two dis-
crete problems: the open shop scheduling problem
and the connected list colouring problem. This fi-
nal problem allows a natural interpretation as a
scheduling problem on parallel machines.
Flow-shop problems with a single server are
generalizations of classical flow-shop problems
where setup times are assumed to be separable from
the processing times and all setups have to be done
by a single server. Brucker and Knust derive new
complexity results for special cases where restric-
tions on processing and or setup times are specified.
Blazewicz, Pesch, Sterna, and Werner con-
sider another version of the flow-shop scheduling
problem––the two-machine non-preemptive flow-
shop scheduling problem with the total weighted
late work criterion and a common due date. This
criterion takes into account the duration of task
late parts while ignoring the quantity of this delay.
They have proved the binary NP-hardness of the
problem mentioned and propose a dynamic pro-
gramming approach of pseudo-polynomial time
complexity proving in this way the ordinary NP-
hardness of this problem.
 Editorial / European Journal of Operational Research 165 (2005) 285–288
Janiak, Kovalyov, Kubiak, and Werner study
the single machine scheduling problem with con-
trollable job processing times to minimize a linear
combination of the total weighted job completion
time and the total weighted processing time com-
pression. They show that this scheduling problem
is polynomially equivalent to the problem of
maximizing a special subclass of half-products,
namely, positive half-products. This equivalence
immediately proves that the former problem is
NP-hard in the ordinary sense and that it can be
solved in pseudo-polynomial time by dynamic
programs proposed earlier for the half-product
minimization. They also present two fast fully
polynomial time approximation schemes for any
positive half-product––including the problem with
controllable job processing times.
The paper by Cheng, Ng, Yuan, and Liu studies
the one machine total weighted tardiness schedul-
ing problem. The authors describe an Oðn2 Þ
approximation algorithm for the general problem
without release dates. As the general problem is
NP-hard in the strong sense, the authors also
investigate the NP-hardness of two special cases of
the problem––the case where all job due dates have
equal slacks and the case where job due dates are
affine-linear functions of their processing times
and the job tardiness weights are proportional to
their processing times––and provide algorithms for
their resolution.
The polyhedral aspects of scheduling problems
have been extensively studied since the pioneering
work by Balas. Most of the research in this area,
however, concentrates on the single machine
problem. Cheng and Shakhlevich consider the
preemptive identical parallel machine problem
with identical jobs and both the non-preemptive
and preemptive versions of the unit-time open shop
scheduling problem. They construct a linear
description of the scheduling polyhedron for these
problems which consists of simultaneous linear
inequalities that specify the convex hull of the job
completion time vectors associated with the feasi-
ble schedules. The study of the properties of the
scheduling polyhedron enables the demonstration
that these problems are solvable in polynomial time
in the case of an arbitrary non-decreasing separable
objective function of job completion times.
287
The two subsequent papers propose solution
procedures for variants of the parallel machine
scheduling problem.
Ghirardi and Potts consider the problem of
scheduling jobs on unrelated parallel machines to
minimize the maximum completion time. The
paper presents an application of the Recovering
Beam Search method to this problem that requires
polynomial time. The Recovering Beam Search
differs from the traditional Beam Search approach
in that it allows the possibility of correcting wrong
decisions by replacing partial solutions with oth-
ers. The algorithm produces good results on large
instances within a reasonable time limit.
Singh considers a machine scheduling problem
with parallel processors, precedence constraints,
unit execution time tasks, unit communication
delays, and the criterion of maximum lateness. In
the case when the graph representing the partially
ordered set of tasks is an outforest, it is shown that
if the number of processors is restricted then the
generalization of the Brucker–Garey–Johnson
algorithm previously presented by the same author
is a 2-approximation algorithm, and produces an
optimal schedule if the number of processors is
sufficiently large. Another polynomial time algo-
rithm, which enables us to obtain an optimal
schedule when the number of processors is two
and precedence constraints are given in the form of
an outforest, is also presented.
The flow-shop scheduling problem has been the
subject of extensive research in recent years. Ruiz
and Maroto present a review and comparative
evaluation of heuristics and metaheuristics for this
problem. The computational comparison is made
against Taillard’s benchmarks and includes 25
methods, ranging from the classical Johnson’s
algorithm or dispatching rules to the most recent
metaheuristics.
The last group of papers focuses on proposing
new models and solution approaches to various
practical applications. Two papers deal with a
subject of major importance to production sched-
uling in process industries, the management
of storage systems. The paper by Neumann,
Schwindt, and Trautmann deals with scheduling
continuous, discontinuous, and semi-continuous
material flows in process industries, where scarce
288 Editorial / European Journal of Operational Research 165 (2005) 285–288
production resources and intermediate storage
facilities with different configurations and limited
capacity have to be taken into account. The au-
thors formulate a basic production scheduling
problem in process industries where a convex
objective function is to be minimized subject to
(renewable and cumulative) resource and temporal
constraints. They propose a branch-and-bound
algorithm for its resolution. Additional features
which frequently occur in practice can be included
without difficulty.
In the context of an implementation in a con-
strained-based system, Sourd and Rogerie intro-
duce the continuous reservoir model in which the
activity fills or empties the reservoir at a constant
rate from its start time to end time. By introducing
the concept of function variables, the model is
generalized to deal with additional constraints,
such as leaks or overflows, that cannot be mod-
elled by filling and emptying activities. Other dis-
tinguishing features of the generalized model are
that the durations and the depletion or replenish-
ment rates of the activities are assumed to be
decision variables and secondly, the depletion and
replenishment rates may depend on the current
inventory level. Timetabling is adapted and ex-
tended to this new model.
Alvarez-Vald
es, Fuertes, Tamarit, Gim
enez,
and Ramos deal with the design and implementa-
tion of a scheduling system in a glass factory. The
problem can be considered as a generalization of
the flexible job-shop problem with both single and
parallel machines, job batches, setup times, release
dates, and due dates. The goal is to obtain feasible
schedules by minimizing the makespan if the
problem is feasible, or to obtain a ‘‘best compro-
mise’’ schedule if a full solution is not possible.
Lacomme, Prins, and Ramdane-Cherif consider
the Periodic Capacitated Arc Routing Problem
(PCARP) which involves the routing of vehicles to
treat a set of arcs in a network where the trips must
be planned over a multi-period horizon. Solving
the PCARP implies the simultaneous determina-
tion of planning (the assignment of street services
to periods) and scheduling (the detailed solution of
the resulting CARP for one period) decisions over
the whole horizon. The promising results shown
in the paper demonstrate the value of integrat-
ing tactical and operational decisions in long-
term planning problems not only in arc routing
but also in manufacturing. Notice that the PCARP
may be viewed as a multi-period production
problem when vehicles are considered as machines,
street services as tasks, and service costs as dura-
tions.
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our gratitude to the spon-
sors who made the Workshop possible: The City
of Valencia, The University of Valencia, Fundaci

o
Universitat-Empresa de Valencia (ADEIT), Insti-
tuto Valenciano de Investigaciones Econ
omicas
(IVIE), Ministerio de Educaci
on, Cultura y De-
porte de Espa~ na, The Associaton of European
Operational Research Societies (EURO).
Vicente Valls
Facultad de Matematicas
Departamento de Estad. e Investig. Operat.
Universidad de Valencia
Dr. Moliner 50, 46100
Burjassot, Valencia, Spain
E-mail address: vicente:valls@uv:es
Jan Weglarz
Technical University of Poznan
Poland
Available online 1 June 2004