222 publications from this institution
While the literature provides some reflection on the relation between Project Management and New Product Development (NPD), there are still doubts on how these practices can be integrated. This study made a contribution on how a metalworking company should integrate Project Management with their established NPD process. Additionally, a proposal about how the company should integrate the Subproject with the Global Project is made. Two main concerns guided the development of this work: the integrated project management process should be useful and easy to use. Therefore, only six main project management practices are proposed: project charter, initial project plan, progress reports, updated plan, open point list and lessons learned.
This article presents the implementation of lean principles using action research, in a health-care environment, focused on the operating room. Lean production has been successively adopted in the services sector because its implementation improves process efficiency and resources management. Additionally, a culture of continuous improvement search is created in the organization, a culture focused on the client (patient) that creates value for the client. This implies a change of the paradigm that prevails in some countries where the doctor is viewed as the ‘client’. The action research described in this article promoted lean principles in an operating room and support warehouses. The results were as follows: stocks management improved, warehouse spaces reduced by 20 to 25 per cent, operating room areas were better organized, equipment and obsolete surgical material were eliminated, equipment management was improved and operating times were reduced. Furthermore, it was necessary to create productivity indicators for the operating room to improve visual management and train staff for adopting a lean behaviour and attitude. This action research describes a trend in health care that implies an organizational change of culture and paradigm.
We address the issue of optimal resource allocation, and more specifically, the analysis of complementarity of resources (primary resource or P-resource and supportive resource or S-resource) to activities in a project. In this paper we present new computational results of a Genetic Algorithm, based in a random keys alphabet.
1. Abstract Given a project network under stochastic conditions, the goal is to determine the optimal resource allocation to the activities in order to minimize the total project cost. This cost includes the resource cost and the tardiness cost. In this work we consider the multiple resources case, which is an extension of the models previously developed by the first author and other researchers, considering a single resource. We assume that all the resources are independent and abundant. The work consists mainly of two parts: formalization of the new models, and their implementation in Java. In order to formalize the models, it was necessary to establish an allocation strategy for the multiple resources. This is required to ensure the desired equality of expected durations yielded by each resource in the same activity. We study four different allocation strategies: two of them are derived from the stochastic nature of the work content by equalizing the expected durations, thus determining the allocation vectors; and the other two go down to the level of all possible values to devise an allocation method (among all the allocation vectors, selects those leading to equal expected durations). Then the probability distributions of the variables required for analysis and evaluation were determined. Although the research has covered four strategies, one proved to be inferior compared to the others, and another was too complex to be easily implemented. The remaining two are strong rivals with neither dominating the other, and one of them was arbitrarily chosen for implementation. The implementation covers three algorithms: Dynamic Programming Algorithm, Electromagnetic Algorithm and Evolutionary Algorithm. Concurrent programming was exploited to enhance performance. We report on the performance of our application over a representative set of project networks.
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This paper presents a tool which goal is aiding the user to choose the best Decision Support Software between a set of Software residing in a database, according to the features desired, and using multicriteria decision methods. This application was developed using the C# programming language and allows to save in a file all user data, such as the set of Decision Software Tools under consideration and its features to be used afterwards.
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ICOPEV2018: 4th International Conference on Production Economics and Project Evaluation | 20 Set. - 21 Set. 2018
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The economic activity of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) has become increasingly project-oriented. Given SMEs’ significant role in promoting social and economic well-being, Project Management (PM) has emerged as a crucial tool for fostering innovation and sustainability within these companies and society as a whole. However, there is a gap in the existing literature concerning identifying practices that ensure innovation and sustainability throughout PM within SMEs and the associated benefits of adopting these practices. To address this gap, a comprehensive Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted, gathering articles from reputable databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. In addition, this study seeks to explore the practical, political, and theoretical implications of these findings. The review identified 166 innovation practices, 86 sustainability practices, and 61 benefits, which were categorized based on their primary subject areas. The results of this study contribute to both the academic and practical understanding of the interplay between PM, innovation, and sustainability in SMEs. By identifying these practices and associated benefits, this research provides valuable insights for practitioners and policymakers, enabling them to foster innovation and sustainability within SMEs. In conclusion, this research fills a critical gap in the literature by providing an in-depth analysis of innovation and sustainability practices in the context of PM in SMEs. Also, it identifies that the benefits of adopting these practices extend well beyond economic considerations. The practical, political, and theoretical implications of these findings underscore the importance of integrating PM, innovation, and sustainability for the overall well-being of SMEs and society.
This paper presents an innovative approach to compressing and decompressing activity durations within the context of multi-project scheduling under uncertainty and resource flexibility. In dynamic project environments, fixed activity durations often restrict optimal scheduling outcomes. To address this challenge, the proposed method systematically adjusts activity durations—through compression and decompression—while maintaining resource and precedence feasibility. By integrating Critical Path Method (CPM) analysis with heuristic rules, the approach identifies candidate activities whose durations can be reduced or extended based on slack availability and resource effort profiles. The objective is to enhance scheduling flexibility, improve resource utilization, and better align project execution with organizational priorities. Validated through a case study at an automotive company in Portugal, the method demonstrates its practical effectiveness in recalibrating schedules and balancing resource loads. This contribution offers a timely and necessary innovation for companies aiming to enhance responsiveness and competitiveness in increasingly complex project landscapes. It provides an actionable framework for dynamic schedule adjustment in multi-project environments, helping companies to respond more effectively to uncertainty and resource fluctuations. Importantly, the proposed approach also supports sustainability objectives in new product development and supply chain operations. By optimizing resource usage, reducing idle time and overuse, and improving responsiveness to real-world conditions, it contributes to minimizing waste, increasing operational resilience, and aligning project execution with strategic sustainability goals.
In the past several years, various optimization algorithms had been implemented on the project total cost minimization problem. Lately, it was developed an application that serves as a central platform that integrates all those previous implementations. Currently, such platform allows the access and execution of each one of the other utilities as modules/plugins. Each of which can be configured to execute optimizations over different projects. Although the platform already saves the optimization results, it lacks a suitable processing mechanism that would ease the cross analysis over all the utilities. Therefore, we want to include capture and analysis of results into the platform in order to properly aggregate them in a results database. Such database could then be queried for numerous purposes being the performance evaluation, across the optimization utilities, one of the first. In this project we analyze a total of five heterogeneous optimization utilities, all coded in Java, using algorithms based on dynamic programming and global optimization. The heterogeneity poses a challenge which we overcame by establishing a common results storage language, by means of XML files.
A “multi-modal” activity is one which can be performed in several modes, or levels, of resource(s) allocation. In this paper we assume that the activities are multi-modal, and each activity may require several resources for its execution. We also assume that the resources may be constrained on their availability over time, and that each activity has its own work contents as a continuous random variable for each of its required resources. We are concerned with establishing a suitable strategy that will focus on the universe of activity modes, selecting only those that will be relevant for the most probable overall project cost. In other words, we choose the most probable modes of activity execution among the theoretical continuum of modes; and propagate the consequences of that choice throughout the project. The proposed approach relies on the partitioning of the work content domains into classes. Using these classes, we address different probabilities for each feasible allocation.
Organizations are experiencing increasing pressure that is amplified by the current economic crises we are facing, where innovation, cost reduction, resource optimization, quality and customer satisfaction are increasingly even more important issues. Likewise, project management appears as a subject that has been growing over the years helping organizations to meet their goals, through the implementation of their projects, following good practices that are documented in various standards and methodologies. This research focuses on such practices. The goal was to find which are the most used project management tools and techniques in Portuguese Private Organizations and what factors influence their use.
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The main objective of this research was to integrate scheduling techniques, documented in the literature, with Microsoft Project 2010, in order to help project managers’ deal with scheduling tasks in an easier and controlled way, and at the same time achieve better results. As far as we know, there is no information about the techniques or algorithms used by Microsoft Project to do the scheduling tasks so the possibility to select the algorithms to use gives a higher degree of control to the project manager. The initial hypothesis was that it is possible to get better results, concerning the project’s duration, using the studied techniques rather than the default scheduling technique used by Microsoft Project 2010, with an increased control.
In this paper we describe an extension of the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). A literature review is presented to place our research in its proper context. The problem presented here belongs to the class of the optimization scheduling problems with multi-level (or multi-mode) activities. This means that the activities can be scheduled at different modes, each mode using a different resource level, implying different costs and durations. Each activity must be allocated exactly one unit of each required resource and the resource unit may be used at any of its specified levels. The processing time of an activity is given by the maximum of the durations that would result from a specific allocation of resources. The objective is to find the optimal solution that minimizes the overall project cost, while respecting a delivery date. A penalty is included for tardiness beyond the specified delivery date. We present a formal description of the problem and a mathematical model for it. We also introduce the implementation algorithm for the problem. The implementation was designed using the JAVA language, and the algorithm proposed is based on a branch and bound procedure, using breadth-first search (BFS) project network traversing, among some heuristic rules to filter large subsets of fruitless candidates relative to resource levels combinations.
