Resource Allocation Capabilities of Commercial Project Management Software Packages

This study concerns the quality of seven commercial project management software packages in allocating resources. Since the methods employed in these packages are proprietary, the quality is measured in terms of the deviation from an upper bound of the minimum makespan. As benchmark instances, a set of problems generated under a factorial design is used. Statistical tests are performed to investigate the impact of the problem parameters and to detect significant differences in quality among the packages.