The application of project scheduling techniques in a real-life environment

The scheduling of activities over time has gained increasing attention with the development of the critical path method (CPM) and the program evaluation and review technique (PERT). Since then, a large amount of solution procedures for a wide range of problem types have been proposed in the literature. Many of these procedures, however, are not able to solve real-life problems. In this paper we describe a capacity expansion project at a water production center (WPC) of the Vlaamse Maatschappij voor Watervoorziening VMW) in Belgium. This project aims at expanding the production capacity of pure water. We show that scheduling the project with certain techniques will improve the financial status of the project. We illustrate this statement with different schedules.