R&D projects selection in telecommunications under uncertainty and resource restrictions using scheduling

Telecommunications R&D organizations, as inserted in a high-technology market environment, need to develop continuously projects. Considering it, a formal approach for project selection is needed, once, in general, there is no enough funding for all of them. One solution is to apply project portfolio selection. Since the original proposal of using mean-variance approach for selecting portfolios, several ways have been proposed. One interesting alternative is mean-Gini approach. Frequently, there is resources limitation for projects execution and this restriction must be considered. In several works in literature, resource limitation in project selection considers all of them starting at the same time. But, considering a time scheduling, resources could be better distributed in time and more portfolios could become feasible. Dealing with information for project selection, uncertainty must be considered due to estimation error. Thus, this work proposes a method for selecting project portfolio using mean-Gini approach, restriction and time scheduling, based on simulation, and dealing with uncertainty of estimated values. The proposed approach was demonstrated by a ten real projects example, allowing to increase the number of feasible options (from 8 to 14) due to time scheduling, and offering to decision maker the information about risk of not attending the resource limitation for a properly risk response plan.