The EURO Working Group on Project Management and Scheduling (WG-PMS) provides an excellent opportunity to discuss recent and important issues in the field of project management (project planning, project scheduling, project control), and machine scheduling (single and parallel processor problems, flow shops, open shops, job shops, etc.) and their applications with researchers and practitioners; most European countries are represented.



The EURO Working Group on Project Management and Scheduling was established by Professors Luís Valadares Tavares and Jan Weglarz during the EURO VIII Conference held in Lisbon, September 1986. It was then decided to organize a workshop every two years. The first workshop was held in Lisbon in 1988. The list of following once can be found here. Gathering the most promising theoretical and applied advances in Project Management and Scheduling, and to assess the state-of-the-art of this field and its potential to support management systems are the objectives of these workshops. An abstract booklet is distributed to the participants at each meeting.

The group is suitable for people who are presently engaged in project management and/or scheduling, either in theoretical aspects or applications in business, industry or public administration.

Scheduling problems can be understood broadly as the problems of the allocation of resources over time to perform a set of tasks. By resources we understand arbitrary means the tasks compete for. They can be of a very different nature, e.g. manpower, money, processors (machines), energy, tools. Also tasks can have a variety of interpretations starting from machining parts in manufacturing systems up to processing information in computer systems. The same is true for task characteristics, e.g. ready times, due dates, relative urgency weights, functions relating task processing to allotted resources. Moreover, a structure of a set of tasks, reflecting precedence constraints among them, can be defined in different ways. In addition, different criteria which measure the quality of the performance of a set of tasks can be taken into account. It is easy to imagine that scheduling problems understood so generally appear almost everywhere in real-world situations. Of course, there are many aspects concerning approaches for modeling and solving these problems which are of general methodological importance. On the other hand, however, some classes of scheduling problems have their own specificity which should be taken into account. To say the least, scheduling problems constitute one of the most important and challenging areas of operations research and discrete mathematics.