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

Wendi Tian () and Erik Demeulemeester ()

Annals of Operations Research, 2014, vol. 213, issue 1, 291 pages

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. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Railway scheduling; Roadrunner scheduling; Feeding buffer; Priority list; Resource availability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-012-1277-0

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