Specifically, any scenario where you have complex rules governing limited resources. Think large-scale, multi-year waterfall projects with $XX million budgets and hundreds to thousands of resources (people, machines, etc.).
Here are couple examples:
- Construction and engineering projects with thousands of interdependent tasks, crews and equipment
- Job-shop and flow-shop manufacturing where parts must move through machines under sequence and capacity constraints
If any of this sounds familiar, interesting, or you have direct experience dealing with these problems (as a PM, etc.), let's connect.
Shoot me an email at *** hello at mradek dot com *** or reply in this thread!
Also, before improving it, you might want to lay out what's wrong with it. What specific problems in the real world did you try to solve, what solutions did you try, and with what results?
If you're not doing the work, you probably won't have the experience to meaningfully improve it. It's better to work on solutions to problems in industries you're familiar with.
If you did the work and hit limitations, your interim goal should be to improve planning for those problems. Such narrower, specific goals might help you both succeed and get talented help. That should be in your problem statement or on your landing page.
That's all the help I can give since I have no time for developing stuff these days.
There is also dedicated software like Timefold, formerly RedHat OptaPlanner [0].