Project Scheduling Optimization in Service Centre Management

This paper deals with a real-life problem that comes up in the daily management of Service Centres. It is a complex resource allocation and task scheduling problem that has to be solved online in a dynamic and uncertain environment. The uncertainty resides both in the task durations and the task arrival times. It is shown that this problem can be formulated and solved using project scheduling models, algorithms and concepts. To deal with uncertainty, a bi-criteria quality robustness concept in dynamic environments which extends the usual concept of static quality robustness is introduced. Several proactive-reactive scheduling procedures and surrogate measures of robustness are proposed. The computational experiments carried out on more than 700 randomly generated dynamic scenarios indicate that proactive scheduling procedures are able to prepare the predictive schedule to anticipate future infeasibilities.