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Improved critical chain buffer management framework considering resource costs and schedule stability

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Abstract

The critical chain scheduling and buffer management (CC/BM) methodology has proven to be a favorable approach to schedule resource-constrained projects and to offer a valuable control tool for monitoring projects under uncertainty. The previous studies on CC/BM seem to have neglected the cost performance, which might render its wider applications to the modern economic activities that are mostly performed in a project way. This paper presents an improved CC/BM framework that allows additional resource allocation/reallocation to bring forward activity starting times based on cost and schedule stability criteria. In the planning phase, the decision is made concerning the regular resource availability period in order to minimize the expected resource costs. In the execution phase, a scheduled order repair method for rescheduling along with two reactive resource allocation procedures as the corrective action whenever delays are beyond a certain buffer threshold are presented and examined in order to exhibit a comprehensive project schedule/cost control system that is adaptive to the CC/BM management logic. Finally, our computational experiment demonstrates the benefits of the proposed reactive methods under different cost or availability parameters.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the China Scholarship Council. We would like to acknowledge the China Scholarship Council for the financial support and the Research Center for Operations Management of the KU Leuven for providing a visiting research period to Xuejun Hu and Jianjiang Wang.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (Nos. 71271097 and 71201119).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, People’s Republic of China

    Xuejun Hu & Nanfang Cui

  2. Research Center for Operations Management, Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Faculty of Economics and Business, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Xuejun Hu, Erik Demeulemeester & Jianjiang Wang

  3. Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, People’s Republic of China

    Jianjiang Wang

  4. School of Management, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

    Wendi Tian

Authors
  1. Xuejun Hu
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  2. Erik Demeulemeester
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  3. Nanfang Cui
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  4. Jianjiang Wang
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  5. Wendi Tian
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jianjiang Wang.

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Hu, X., Demeulemeester, E., Cui, N. et al. Improved critical chain buffer management framework considering resource costs and schedule stability. Flex Serv Manuf J 29, 159–183 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10696-016-9241-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10696-016-9241-y

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