Title: Scheduling Modular Projects on a Bottleneck Resource
Speaker: Dr. Roel Leus
Affiliation: Faculty of Business and Economics of KU Leuven
Location: Room 572A Huxley Building
Time: 11:00am

Abstract. In this paper, we model a research-and-development project as consisting of several modules, with each module containing one or more activities. We examine how to schedule the activities of such a project in order to maximize the expected profit when the activities have a probability of failure and when an activity's failure can cause its module and thereby the overall project to fail. A module succeeds when at least one of its constituent activities is successfully executed. All activities are scheduled on a scarce resource that is modeled as a single machine. We describe various policy classes, establish the relationship between the classes, develop exact algorithms to optimize over two different classes (one dynamic program and one branch-and-bound algorithm), and examine the computational performance of the algorithms on randomly generated instance sets.

About the speaker. Roel Leus holds a Master's degree (1998) in Business Engineering and a PhD (2003) in Applied Economics from KU Leuven (Belgium). He is currently Associate Professor of Operations Research at the Faculty of Business and Economics of KU Leuven. He has been a visiting researcher at London Business School (2004) and at LAAS-CNRS Toulouse (2008).