Integration of equipment planning and project scheduling

It is common to schedule project activities first, then the utilization of equipment and its operating crew is planned based on such schedule. Real world experiences indicate that activity scheduling can be heavily impacted by the resources needed. In particular, if a project requires highly specialized and expensive equipment type, then one needs to take into account the schedule and cost of such resources in developing the project schedule.In this paper, we consider the impact of using expensive and specialized equipment on the project schedule and its cost. The integration of project scheduling with equipment planning introduces new trade-offs that would lead to more realistic and cost-effective project schedules. Such trade-offs include the costs of: activity crashing, equipment setup, transition, idle time, and operator’s overtime as well as the project worth; rewards for early completion and penalty for delayed completion. An efficient mixed integer linear program is developed to capture the real world considerations of the integrated problem. The solution of the program yields the optimal schedules for the activities, equipment, and operators. These schedules involve crashing of critical and non-critical activities. An efficient heuristic is also developed and used to schedule large size projects. Optimal schedules are analyzed and computational experiences are provided.