A new book by Vlerick Professor Mario Vanhoucke – entitled Project Management with Dynamic Scheduling: baseline scheduling, risk analysis and project control – has been published by Springer. The focus of this book – dynamic scheduling – refers to 3 dimensions of project management and scheduling: the construction of a project baseline schedule, risk analysis and the project control phase.
Managers have used Business Analytics (BA) – which is a subset of business intelligence (BI) – to inform their decision making for years. Recent studies point to its growing importance, not only in analyzing past performance but also in identifying opportunities to improve future performance. As business environments become more complex and competitive, managers need to be able to detect – or, even better – predict trends and respond to them early. Companies are giving business analytics increasingly high priority in hopes of gaining an edge on their competitors.
A maintenance company whose staff provide day and night coverage for airlines on a complex flight schedule needs to keep its labour costs down without alienating unions yet remain flexible enough to cover for the unexpected. Time to call in an algorithm. This project, explained in the paper “Improving Workforce Scheduling of Aircraft Line Maintenance at Sabena Technics”, demonstrates the potential for optimization programming taking in diverse demand and supply variables to solve complex scheduling problems.
Mario Vanhoucke discusses his new book about project performance and controlling the phases of the project life cycle.