Abstract: Enterprises tend to manage multiple projects in a distributed manner where the global resources are shared among autonomous projects. In the actual process of multi-projects scheduling, however, the availability of global resources is often uncertain due to some unexpected situations or stochastic factors, resulting in disruption of activities, waste of resources and other consequences. A new level of complexity is therefore added to the traditional project management. The distributed resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem (DRCMPSP) is studied under uncertain global resource availabilities.

Key words: distributed multi-project; stochastic scheduling; uncertain global resource availability; coordination mechanism; dynamic programming