The academic accounting literature has established that the conditions under which costing systems in general and Activity Based Costing (ABC) in particular provide accurate costs are very stringent. Less is known, however, about the nature, level and bias of costing errors and their...

Recently, time-switch constraints have been introduced in the literature by Yang and Chen (2000). Basically, these constraints impose a specified starting time on the project activities and force them to be inactive during specified time periods. This type of constraints have been incorporated...

Nursing staff is principally cyclically scheduled in various hospitals in Belgium. The employed cyclic schedules embody, however, only a weak reflection of the ultimate nurse rosters constructed for a specific month. In this paper we investigate the benefits of integrating nurse-specific...

This paper describes a detailed study of a recursive search algorithm for different optimization problems. Although the algorithm has been originally developed for a project scheduling problem with financial objectives, we show that it can be extended to many other application areas and...

Time/cost trade-offs have been extensively studied in the literature since the development of the critical path method. Recently, the discrete version of the problem formulation has been extended to various practical assumptions, and solved with both exact and heuristic optimization procedures....

Earned Value Management (EVM) in project management integrates cost, schedule and technical performance and allows the calculation of cost and schedule variances, performance indices and forecasts of project cost and schedule duration. The earned value method provides early indicators of project...

In the last few decades, several effective algorithms for solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem have been proposed. However, the challenging nature of this problem, summarised in its strongly NP-hard status, restricts the effectiveness of exact optimisation to relatively...

In the last few decades the resource-constrained project scheduling problem has become a popular problem type in operations research. However, due to its strongly NP-hard status, the effectiveness of exact optimisation procedures is restricted to relatively small instances. In this paper we...

In this paper, we present a hybrid genetic algorithm for the well-known nurse scheduling problem (NSP). The NSP involves the construction of roster schedules for nursing staff in order to maximize the quality of the roster schedule and to minimize the violations of the minimal coverage...

The efficient management of nursing personnel is of critical importance in a hospital’s environment comprising a vast share of the hospital’s operational costs. The nurse scheduling process affects highly the nurses’ working conditions, which are strongly related to the provided quality of...