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Railway scheduling reduces the expected project makespan over roadrunner scheduling in a multi-mode project scheduling environment

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Abstract

The Critical Chain Scheduling and Buffer Management (CC/BM) methodology, proposed by Goldratt (Critical chain, 1997), introduced the concepts of feeding buffers, project buffers and resource buffers as well as the roadrunner mentality. This last concept, in which activities are started as soon as possible, was introduced in order to speed up projects by taking advantage of predecessors finishing early. Later on, the railway scheduling concept of never starting activities earlier than planned was introduced as a way to increase the stability of the project, typically at the cost of an increase in the expected project makespan. In this paper, we will indicate a realistic situation in which railway scheduling improves both the stability and the expected project makespan over roadrunner scheduling.

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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 Wendi Tian. We would also like to acknowledge the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71201119 and No. 71271097) for their support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Operations Management, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Wendi Tian & Erik Demeulemeester

  2. School of Management, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan, China

    Wendi Tian

  3. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Wendi Tian

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  1. Wendi Tian
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  2. Erik Demeulemeester
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Correspondence to Erik Demeulemeester.

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Tian, W., Demeulemeester, E. Railway scheduling reduces the expected project makespan over roadrunner scheduling in a multi-mode project scheduling environment. Ann Oper Res 213, 271–291 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-012-1277-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-012-1277-0

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