Today, no less than 164 students from Ghent University (including several Erasmus students) have optimized time/cost trade-offs in project scheduling using the Project Scheduling Game. 164 people together in a room that is too small with only 50 computers... so we divided the group in two subgroups:
The article titled "An integrated nurse staffing and scheduling analysis for longer-term nursing staff allocation problems" by Broos Maenhout and Mario Vanhoucke has appeared in Omega - The International Journal of Management Science.
Today, four new students joined our OR&S group for a period of 4 years to carry out high quality (hopefully :-)) research in Operations Research, with a focus on Project Management and Personnel Planning and the development of integrative tools for both disciplines. The four new students are, in alphabetical order:
PMI-Belgium recognizes the importance of research (again!).
The student Pieter Leyman has received the PMI-Belgium prize for the best thesis on Project Management during the graduation ceremony for the Commercial Engineers (Handelsingenieurs) on 22/09/2012. The thesis was supervised by Prof. dr. Mario Vanhoucke from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (www.feb.ugent.be) from the Ghent University.
ArcelorMittal award for best thesis at Ghent University.
The student Louis-Philippe Kerkhove has received the ArcelorMittal prize for the best thesis during the graduation ceremony for the Commercial Engineers (Handelsingenieurs) on 22/09/2012. The thesis was supervised by Prof. dr. Mario Vanhoucke from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (www.feb.ugent.be) from the Ghent University.
Back in the days, somewhere in the beginning of 2000, the Operations Research & Scheduling (OR&S) group was investigating the impact of the network structure of a project on the performance of algorithms to schedule projects within limited resources.
P2 Engine, our software tool that is used by both students and PhD researchers, has now a new webpage where example files can be downloaded. For those who are familiar with the two Project Management books, the scripts should be able to clarify how we did our experiments during the development of ProTrack and P2 Engine.
Analytics must be put centre stage in decision making!
How to move to a fact-based decision-making process?
In a viewpoint on the BBC news on August 16, 2012, Stacy Blanchard (Senior director, talent and organisation, Accenture) expressed the need to have strong analytical skills to support decision making in today's volatile business environment.
See the original research article 
