Project scheduling in an industrial context

This paper presents a generic model for an industrial project scheduling problem. This problem is an extension of the RCPSP and the MultiSkill RCPSP. The main differences with RCPSP are that both preemptive activities and nonpreemptive activities are considered and resources requirements of activities are given in term of skills. This model and its resolution methods aim to be used into OFBiz open source ERP, and then have to satisfy some industrial constraints. One of these constraints is the use of a rule based engine to build solutions. Thus this paper has two objectives (1) propose a general model for this problem and (2) evaluate the impact of the use of a rule based engine to get solutions. We first propose an ILP formulation. Then to evaluate the benefit or the drawback to use a rule based engine for solving this industrial problem. Hence, preliminary results are presented comparing a method using a rule based engine and a method based standard programming. In the best of our knowledge, there is no implementation of the RCPSP muti-skill algorithms inside ERPs, in general the ERPs refer to another scheduling software to retrieve the result of scheduling algorithms. In OFBiz, time execution limit for web services is user-defined so we can say that there is no time constraints related to environment.