Energy project portfolio selection and scheduling

Abstract

In the present work, we formulated an integrated method in order to confront two problems regarding a project portfolio that contains energy projects and/or proposals for projects to be implemented in the future. More specifically, the problems are: the selection of the most beneficial projects and then the their scheduling. Our approach is based on extending a tested and well-performed Dynamic Programming solution for project portfolio scheduling in order to serve the selection problem as well. The approach is utilizing the Incremental Funding Method (IFM). Most of the existing bibliography is focused on project scheduling problems, although an adequate part is dedicated to the project portfolio scheduling problem. Moreover, the mainstream line of thought until recently, considered these two fields of study as relevant but the majority of the researchers tried to concentrate on only one of them treating them as two distinct domains. However, contemporary organizations ought to handle simultaneously a bundle of project proposals, to select a subset of them due to budget’s constraints, and then to schedule them in order to maximize their potential profit. The proposed method extends the IFM concept in order to cover the energy projects and stands for a tool to select and schedule simultaneously the implementation of project proposals that give the maximum value to the performing organization. The outcome of this enhanced method produces quite promising results when tried on a tailor-made set of benchmark instances. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.