Optimal scheduling for the decommissioning of nuclear sites

With production having come to an end at the Sellafield nuclear site in West Cumbria, focus is now turning to its decommissioning, and the safe clean-up of legacy nuclear waste. The decommissioning project is expect to take in excess of 100 years to complete and cost over $90 billion. Given the large scale and complexity of this project, it is crucial that each task is systematically choreographed according to a carefully designed master schedule, determining both the start time, and duration of each activity, in order to reduce the project completion time. We show how this scheduling problem can be formulated as a continuous time/resource trade-off problem with a single renewably constrained resource, and subsequently propose a heuristic approach to constructing such a master schedule.