Resource-allocation capabilities of commercial project management software. An experimental analysis

When project managers determine schedules for resource-constrained projects, they commonly use commercial project management software packages. Which resource-allocation methods are implemented in these packages is proprietary information. The resource-allocation problem is in general computationally difficult to solve to optimality. Hence, the question arises if and how various project management software packages differ in quality with respect to their resource-allocation capabilities. None of the few existing papers on this subject uses a sizeable data set and recent versions of common software packages. We experimentally analyze the resource-allocation capabilities of Acos Plus.1, AdeptTracker Professional, CS Project Professional, Microsoft Office Project 2007, Primavera P6, Sciforma PS8, and Turbo Project Professional. Our analysis is based on 1560 instances of the precedence- and resource-constrained project scheduling problem RCPSP. The experiment shows that using the resource-allocation feature of these packages may lead to a project duration increase of almost 115% above the best known feasible schedule. The increase gets larger with increasing resource scarcity and with increasing number of activities. We investigate the impact of different complexity scenarios and priority rules on the project duration obtained by the software packages. We provide a decision table to support managers in selecting a software package and a priority rule.

A note on the selection of priority rules in software packages for project management

Various software packages for project management include a procedure for resource-constrained scheduling. In several packages, the user can influence this procedure by selecting a priority rule. However, the resource-allocation methods that are implemented in the procedures are proprietary information; therefore, the question of how the priority-rule selection impacts the performance of the procedures arises. We experimentally evaluate the resource-allocation methods of eight recent software packages using the 600 instances of the PSPLIB J120 test set. The results of our analysis indicate that applying the default rule tends to outperform a randomly selected rule, whereas applying two randomly selected rules tends to outperform the default rule. Applying a small set of more than two rules further improves the project durations considerably. However, a large number of rules must be applied to obtain the best possible project durations.