A project portfolio selection decision support system

The selection and scheduling of a portfolio of projects is a task frequently found among the strategical activities performed by management staff in several industries. When choosing a project to be selected and scheduled into a portfolio, managers have to deal with conflicting criteria, resource constraints, distinct scenarios, and changes during the planning and execution phases. In this work, we describe the functionalities of a decision support system (DSS) prototype designed to help managers make better decisions, when constructing a portfolio of projects. The DSS software was developed to solve portfolio selection problems originating at a large corporation in the power generation industry. It implements a heuristic algorithm, which finds solutions at least 10% better than a manually produced solution for a real-world input instance.