Das Streben nach Flexibilität hat in innovativen Beschaffungsentscheidungen den Rang eines eigenständigen Entscheidungsziels: Die Nachfrager wollen sich die Möglichkeit der Entschlußrevision offenhalten. Die Anbieter entsprechen diesem Streben nach Handlungsautonomie ihres Partners durch das...

This paper considers two problem classes that are important to researchers as well as practitioners, namely packing and project scheduling problems. First, the two problem categories are described. This includes a classification of packing problems as well as of project scheduling concepts....

A recurring problem in project management involves the allocation of scarce resources to the individual jobs comprising the project. In many situations such as audit scheduling, the resources correspond to individuals (skilled labour). This naturally leads to an assignment type project...

In project management, the project duration can often be compressed by accelerating some of its activities at an additional expense. This is the so-called time-cost tradeoff problem which has been extensively studied in the past. However, the discrete version of the problem which is of great...

For most computationally intractable problems there exists no heuristic that is equally effective on all instances. Rather, any given heuristic may do well on some instances but will do worse on others. Indeed, even the 'best' heuristics will be dominated by others on at least some subclasses of...

This paper introduces a new general framework for genetic algorithms to solve a broad range of optimization problems. When designing a genetic algorithm, there may be several alternatives for a component such as crossover, mutation or decoding procedure, and it may be difficult to determine the...