The VMW Project

The scheduling of activities over time has gained increasing attention with the development of the Critical Path Method (CPM) and the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), as discussed in the previous chapters. Since then, a large amount of solution procedures for a wide range of problem types have been proposed in the literature. In the previous chapters, it was implicitly assumed that the schedule objective is time, i.e. the construction of a precedence feasible schedule aiming at minimizing the total project duration. In a practical project setting, there often are many other scheduling objectives (a detailed description of different scheduling objectives is the topic of Chaps.7 and 8) and consequently, many of the traditional time minimizing PERT/CPM procedures are not able to solve real life problems. This chapter describes a capacity expansion project at a water production center (WPC) of the Vlaamse Maatschappij voor Watervoorziening (VMW) in Belgium and serves as an illustration of the use of scheduling algorithms and principles in a practical project environment without the presence of limited resources. The project aims at expanding the production capacity of pure water. It will be shown that scheduling the project with certain techniques will improve the financial status of the project. A modified version of the project description has been used for the project scheduling game of Chap.3.