Publications

Schedule Management Optimization (SMO) Domain Model: Version 1.2

Backlund, Peter B.; Melander, Darryl J.; Pierson, Adam J.; Flory, John A.; Dessanti, Alexander D.; Henry, Stephen M.; Gauthier, John H.

Schedule Management Optimization (SMO) is a tool for automatically generating a schedule of project tasks. Project scheduling is traditionally achieved with the use of commercial project management software or case-specific optimization formulations. Commercial software packages are useful tools for managing and visualizing copious amounts of project task data. However, their ability to automatically generate optimized schedules is limited. Furthermore, there are many real-world constraints and decision variables that commercial packages ignore. Case-specific optimization formulations effectively identify schedules that optimize one or more objectives for a specific problem, but they are unable to handle a diverse selection of scheduling problems. SMO enables practitioners to generate optimal project schedules automatically while considering a broad range of real-world problem characteristics. SMO has been designed to handle some of the most difficult scheduling problems -- those with resource constraints, multiple objectives, multiple inventories, and diverse ways of performing tasks. This report contains descriptions of the SMO modeling concepts and explains how they map to real-world scheduling considerations.