A scheduling approach for ship design project with fields constraint in tasks and human resources

The subject of this paper is a complex ship design project scheduling where resources are labor forces and tasks are limited to deadlines. Furthermore, every labor force has skill in one field and tasks should be performed with labor force in same field. The design project has to be scheduled before it starts and tasks are assigned to designers with restrictions that each designer can execute one task at same time only and a task can be performed by one designer during its period, so that we respect most of the constraints and minimize the project finish date. We give a linear programming formulation of this problem. Then a practical approach is then developed. Finally, a hypothetical example is presented in order to demonstrate how it works in practice.