On the morning of October 29, 2024, at the invitation of the School of Management, Professor Mario Vanhoucke from Ghent University, Belgium, engaged in academic exchange with the faculty and students at the School of Management, presenting an academic lecture titled "A Quest for Projects with Scarce Resources: Seeking Schedule Intelligence through Project Data Discovery" in Lecture Hall 214. This lecture was the 26th session of the School of Management's 2024 Overseas Lecture Series, chaired by Professor Zhang Jingwen, with the participation of some teachers and graduate students from the School of Management.

Professor Mario Vanhoucke shared his research work on project scheduling problem data and instance libraries with the attendees. He stated that instance libraries are fundamental for numerical experiments in project scheduling problem research and are crucial for the study of project scheduling problems. Mario Vanhoucke first introduced the PSPLIB instance library, which is most commonly used in the study of the classic Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP), and then presented 10 related research works he conducted on instance libraries, along with the corresponding research outcomes. These mainly include aspects such as project network generation, solution updating, exact algorithms, and instance improvements. During this process, Mario Vanhoucke provided his unique insights on why project scheduling research requires so much data. At the end of the lecture, Mario Vanhoucke exchanged with the attendees about the related research work currently being carried out by the doctoral students in his team and warmly invited graduate students from the School of Management to join his team for further academic exchanges in the future.

The lecture sparked widespread discussion among the attendees, who communicated with Mario Vanhoucke about the content of the lecture. Professor Zhang Jingwen summarized the lecture, and the participants responded enthusiastically, greatly promoting and stimulating everyone's scientific research enthusiasm and interest.

Introduction to the Speaker:

Mario Vanhoucke is a professor and head of the Business Informatics & Operations Management department at Ghent University in Belgium. He also serves as a senior researcher at the Management Science & Innovation department at University College London (UK) and a professor at the Technology and Operations Management department at Vlerick Business School (Belgium). He has published over 200 articles in the most influential international academic journals such as "Management Science" and "Operations Research." He has received more than 40 scientific research awards from academic organizations and industry associations, including international rating agencies Research.com and the renowned academic journal "European Journal of Operational Research," as well as the International Project Management Association (IPMA). He has been invited to serve in 13 academic positions, including deputy editor of the authoritative academic journal "Journal of Scheduling" and editor of "Computers & Operations Research."

(Written by Liu Wanjun, Reviewed by Shao Jing and Zhang Shuang)