Flexible multilevel project planning and scheduling methods

Abstract

Although the quarry of project-design tools seems endless, the management of multiprojects has garnered relatively scant attention, albeit in practice one can hardly encounter a company in which just only one project gets accomplished that renders no need to share resources among the various projects or treat somehow their logical succession. The context of multiple project management embraces projects of different nature and objectives, and hence consists of projects with varying project management activities, such that single projects, multiprojects and programs. These projects can be found in different phases in terms of size, relevance, resource needs and urgency, on top that, they can resort to the same resource stock. Despite popularity of the flexible project-design approaches (like agile, extreme, hybrid), one can hardly obtain exact design methods even for the management of single projects. Some papers showed how to transform a flexible project plan back into a traditional project plan, however, this is only used for single projects. In addition, while multilevel project scheduling algorithms already exist for deterministic multilevel project structures, they are not able to handle flexible structures.