A Study On The Multiple Projects Selection And Scheduling On Strategic Orientation

For project-driven enterprises, achievement of their strategic goals mainly depend on the successes of projects. However the projects evaluation and selection in such enterprises, focus on economic indicators of projects but ignore the contribution of projects to the strategic goals. In some worst cases, the selected projects even have negative impacts on an enterprise. Meanwhile, to successfully and efficiently carry out these selected projects, an enterprise needs to allocate their various resources to these projects and coordinate and schedule bottleneck resources(such as human resources, large equipments) shared by these projects. Therefore, under limited resource constraints, how to choose a right project portfolio considering the strategic goal, and to develop a multi-project scheduling program are both challenges for project-driven enterprises.In a few past years, project portfolio management(PPM) and resource-constrained project scheduling problem(RCPSP) have become hot issueses both in project management. Many researchers proposed various project evaluation and selection methods to maximize the economic objectives or minimize the risk of a project portfolio, but those methods ignore the limited resource constraint which can influence the success of project portfolio, and it is difficult for project portfolio to implement because of resource conflicts. Therefore, it requires the method of project scheduling based on resource constraints for enterprises to choose a practical project portfolio in project portfolio choosing, and then develops project schedule.This thesis addresses both PPM and RCPSP and connects them by the limitation of the resources. Firstly, this study reviews the related articles on project evaluation and selection, and chooses the appropriate evaluation indicators to builds a project portfolio evaluation system based on strategic orientation. With such an evaluation system, we calculate the values of the strategic contributions of the alternative projects. Then, we formulate our project portfolio selection problem as a mixed integer linear program(MILP) model to maximize the total strategic contribution of a project portfolio considering the nonrenewable resource constraints. After that, we further considering the multi-project scheduling with the renewable resource constraints. For each single project in the determined project portfolio, we first calculate its initial scheduling scheme by formulating the RCPSP as MILP model which considering the resources constraints within a single project and solved by CPLEX. As there may still exist the resources conflicting between the projects, we propose a heuristic algorithm to eliminate resource conflicts, we free a resource conflicting by a priority order of projects using the resource, which determined by projects’ two characteristics: order strength and resource tightness. We repeatedly solve RCPSP model, check and free resource conflicting until there is not any conflict at each time point or for each kind of resource. Eventually, a feasible multiproject scheduling scheme is obtained. In this thesis, a real numerical example from a project driven enterprise is used to illustrate our proposed method.This study connects PPM and RCPSP with resources constraints and enriches the research on project management. The results of this study may have an effect on improving the multi-project management in project-driven enterprises.