New model maximizes profits in uncertain new product development schedules.
The article discusses a scheduling problem in developing new products for agricultural or pharmaceutical companies. The goal is to create a schedule that maximizes the expected profit while considering uncertainties in costs and durations of tasks. The researchers transformed the complex problem into a simpler mathematical model called Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). They used continuous time and discrete distributions to represent uncertainties. The study presented a small example and discussed different ways to handle scheduling constraints.