Conclusions

This book gave an extensive overview of the literature and best practices on dynamic project scheduling. The focus on scheduling within the field of project management has its roots in the mathematical field of Operations Research that mathematically determines start and finish times of project activities subject to precedence and resource constraints while optimizing a certain project scheduling objective. The initial research done in the late 1950s mainly focused on network based techniques such as CPM (Critical Path Method) and PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique), which are still widely recognized as important project management tools and techniques. The introduction of a personal computer and the never-ending increasing CPU power has led to a substantial increase of research that has been carried out covering various areas of project scheduling (e.g. time scheduling, resource scheduling, cost scheduling). Today the project scheduling research continues to grow in the variety of its theoretical and practical models, in its magnitude and in its application. This book aimed to give an overview of this scheduling history until today and provides some general rules of thumb and best practices interesting for both scheduling researchers and project management practitioners.