Time:10:00-11:30am, May. 23, 2019, Thursday
Venue: RoomA504, Science Building, North Zhongshan Road Campus
Spreker: Professor Nicholas G. Hall, The Ohio State University ，INFORMS President 2018
Host: Associate Professor Yun Shi
Abstract:We study how design decisions in project planning affect the cost of execution. In organizing a project’s tasks into work packages, trade-offs arise. Defining small work packages increases project complexity and workload, and reduces economies of scale, whereas defining large work packages reduces concurrent processing and adversely affects cash flow. Our work is apparently the first to study this trade-off. We consider the objective of minimizing total project cost, subject to a deadline on project makespan. For serial task networks, we describe an efficient algorithm that finds optimal work package sizes. For acyclic task networks, we develop a heuristic method and a lower bound for the unary NP-hard problem. A computational study shows that our heuristic routinely delivers near-optimal solutions that substantially improve on those found by benchmark procedures. Our results demonstrate the value of deliberately varying work package sizes within a project, in contrast to typical project management practice. Related issues including multiple serial paths in parallel, task incompatibility, and generalized precedence constrained work packages are also discussed. Our work enables more precise planning of work packages to improve performance, documents the value of integrating the planning of work packages and schedules, and provides insights that guide resource allocation decisions.
[This is joint work with Chung-Lun Li, Hong Kong Polytechnic University]
Speaker’s Bio：Nicholas G. Hall 教授，俄亥俄州立大学费舍尔商学院讲座教授；本科和硕士毕业于剑桥大学，1986年获得加州大学伯克利分校管理科学博士学位；研究兴趣集中在项目管理和运营管理领域，在Operations Research, Management Science等国际顶级期刊发表论文80余篇；担任国际顶级期刊Management Science, Operations Research 编委工作40余年；现任INFORMS（美国运筹与管理协会）主席；曾应邀到24个国家做大会报告达112场。
