Resource-constrained scheduling of a real project from the construction industry: A comparison of software packages for project management

Commercial software packages for project management apply proprietary, heuristic procedures for resource-constrained scheduling. We analyze the scheduling performance of seven such packages. Three of them offer the possibility to select the priority rule to be used for the resource-constrained scheduling procedure. The project duration obtained strongly depends on this rule. Some packages know several thousand priority rules; in general, it is impossible to predict which rule provides the best result for a given project. By analyzing 1560 projects of an internationally recognized benchmark library, we propose a set of three rules for each package. We apply these rules to a real project from the construction industry. For each of the three packages, the project duration obtained by this set of rules is among the best results for all available rules, and is shorter than the project duration obtained by the packages which do not offer alternative priority rules.