Summary
In this chapter, we addressed several practical model simulation applications based on project management-related models. To start, we looked at the essential elements of project management and how these factors can be simulated to retrieve useful information.
Next, we tackled the problem of running a tiny forest for the wood trade. We treated the problem as an MDP, summarizing the basic characteristics of these processes and then moved on to a practical discussion of them. We defined the elements of the problem and then we saw how to use the policy evaluation and policy improvement algorithms to obtain the optimal forest management policy. This problem was addressed using the MDPtoolbox package, which is available from Python.
Subsequently, we addressed the problem of evaluating the execution times of a project using Monte Carlo simulation. To start, we defined the task execution diagram by specifying which tasks are performed in series and which are performed in parallel...
