Decision support for bids in international plant engineering

The intensive competition in the international market for plant engineering is characterized by high pricing pressure, increase of local content requirements and decrease of project durations. This leads to intricate problems with regard to the choice of production locations and project scheduling. These interacting decisions are to be considered in the bidding phase of a plant project already. This dissertation proposes a mixed-integer optimization model to determine the lower bound of the bid price. ProGen benchmark suits developed in the field of resource-constrained project scheduling problems are extended to evaluate the model. To solve problems with large size and high complexity, a solution method using the Branch & Bound paradigm is developed. Computational results demonstrate the advantage of the solution method in comparison with the application of the commercial software package ILOG CPLEX. Finally, the decision support of the developed model for bidding is demonstrated in an application case using real data from an international plant manufacturing company.