Scheduling an R&D Project with Quality-Dependent Time Slots

In this paper we introduce the concept of quality-dependent time slots in the project scheduling literature. Quality-dependent time slots refer to pre-defined time windows where certain activities can be executed under ideal circumstances (optimal level of quality). Outside these time windows, there is a loss of quality due to detrimental effects. The purpose is to select a quality-dependent time slot for each activity, resulting in a minimal loss of quality. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we show that an R&D project from the bio-technology sector can be transformed to a resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). Secondly, we propose an exact search procedure for scheduling this project with the aforementioned quality restrictions. Finally, we test the performance of our procedure on a randomly generated problem set.

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