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Project Management is becoming increasingly crucial in competitive environments such as manufacturing and the service industries. The Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Scheduling Problem (RCMPSP) consists of assigning start times to jobs corresponding to two or more projects that must be executed simultaneously while respecting the precedence between jobs and limited resources. The existing rise in the study of the RCMPSP resulted in numerous works on the topic while proposing different problem features. This research analyzes different variants of the problem based on aspects related to jobs, projects, relationships, resources, and time management. Moreover, based on the problem variants considered in the collected works, a taxonomy allowing (i) the identification and positioning of each RCMPSP variant and (ii) the analysis of the current state-of-the-art of the problem is proposed. In addition, the solution methods proposed to solve RCMPSPs are classified and analyzed, together with the benchmarks used to validate such approaches. Finally, this review paper discusses the RCMPSP connection to practice and provides future research opportunities in light of recent advances.

For educational purposes, medical residents often have to pass through many departments, which place different requirements on them. They are informed about the upcoming departments by an annual training schedule which keeps the individual departments’ service level as constant as possible. Due to poor planning and uncertain events, deviations in the schedule can occur. These deviations affect the service level in the departments, as well as the training progress and satisfaction of the residents. This article analyzes the impact of priorities on residents’ annual planning based on department assignments to combat uncertainty that might result in departmental changes. We present a novel two-stage formulation that combines residents’ tactical planning with duty and daily scheduling's operational level. We determine an analytical bound for the problem that is superior to the LP bound. Additionally, we approximate a bound based on the solution approach using the objective value of the deterministic solution of an instance and the absences in each scenario. In a computational study, we analyze the performance of various bounds, our solution approach, and the effects of additional priorities in residents’ annual planning. We show that additional priorities can significantly reduce the number of unexpected department assignments. Finally, we derive a practical number of priorities from the results.

The value that users might derive from products and services increasingly depends on their complementarity with other products and services. Whereas prior work has emphasized how firms and complementors design for complementarity, we shift attention to how complementarity arises in use. This study is situated in the smart home market where digital products offer an unbridled range of conceivable combinations, and users may combine products in their system of use that are not initially designed for complementarity. Through a multi-method multiple case study, we distinguish a user pathway besides a producer pathway to establishing complementarity. Complementarity presupposes both the identification of complementary combinations as well as creating technical compatibility between products. In the producer pathway, firms focus mostly on creating technical compatibility while in the user pathway, users identify complementary combinations that go beyond those foreseen by firms. Intermediary toolkits can assist users in creating combinations, and we find that, ultimately, the user pathway also facilitates the producer pathway. Our findings offer insights into the important role of users and intermediaries in innovation ecosystems and extend the scope of user innovation.

Conspiracy theories arise during important societal and political events, with negative consequences. Yet, conspiracy theories remain to be investigated in the context of sporting tournaments, in spite of the importance of such events in contemporary societies. During the 2018 FIFA World Cup, conspiracy theories alleging that the newly introduced video Assistant Referee (VAR) was used with malevolent motives gained popularity online. In this paper, we used a Twitter content analysis to explore VAR conspiracy theories during the World Cup (N = 2,768 tweets). Conspiracy tweets peaked after eliminations of some teams and were strongly associated with labels referring to self-categorization at the group-level, supporting the notion that conspiracy beliefs are triggered by contexts threatening one's social identity. Conspiracy tweets were also correlated with tweets expressing skepticism or defiance against the VAR, suggesting that conspiracy beliefs might be related to sport fans' other identity management strategies. Finally, we drew an intergroup typology of VAR conspiracy beliefs' recurrent figures, highlighting that higher ordered categorization helped conspiracy narratives and content to adapt throughout the tournament. We discuss the identity management strategy status of sport fans' conspiracy beliefs.