Project Scheduling under Resource and Mode Identity Constraints . Part II : An Application to Audit - Staff Scheduling

When scheduling its audit-staff, the management of an auditing firm encompasses a number of different decisions which differ markedly in terms of organizational echelon involved, length of the planning horizon and the planning periods, degree of aggregation of the audit tasks, degree of detail of the required information, and decision objective. We outline an hierarchical planning approach for the audit-staff scheduling problem and demonstrate how the first level can be expressed in terms of the MIRCPSP, which has been presented in Part I of this paper. For solving this problem, we also demonstrate how the solution approach RAMSES, also presented in Part I of this paper, can be adapted to it. We provide a number of different priority rules which can be employed alternatively. The results of an extensive computational study indicate that RAMSES is capable of producing "good" solutions in neglectable amounts of time.