A New Challenge in Project Scheduling. The Incorporation of Activity Failures

The goal of this article is to survey the relevant literature on project scheduling with possible activity failures from a number of different disciplines, and to distill from these sources the formulation of a general optimization problem, the further study of which we would like to foster among the scheduling community. The model has been formulated with R&D projects in mind, but its study may be useful also for developing scheduling methods in other contexts. We discuss a number of different aspects of this task selection and scheduling model with task failures by means of a number of illustrative examples.