Proactive-Reactive Project Scheduling Trade-Offs and Procedures

The vast majority of the research efforts in project scheduling over the past several years have concentrated on the development of exact and heuristic procedures for the generation of a workable baseline schedule assuming complete information and a static and deterministic environment. During project execution, however, a project may be subject to considerable uncertainty. Proactive-reactive project scheduling deals with uncertainty by creating a baseline schedule that is as much as possible protected against disruptions and by deploying reactive scheduling procedures to revise or reoptimize this schedule when necessary. This chapter focuses on the main principles of proactive-reactive scheduling and dwells on schedule robustness and its measurements. A number of recently developed proactive and reactive scheduling heuristics are described and their working principles are illustrated on a problem example