West IT Solutions is expanding into a new focus area, ”Smart Planning”. They want to develop new modules for the Enterprise Resource Planning software they resell, Odoo. Odoo allows companies to manage their projects, employees and other resources. The goal of this project was to create a software product that assists users in creating plannings for their projects in Odoo. The product should offer the following features: Visualise a planning for the user’s projects, Facilitate manually adapting the planning and Propose an automatically generated improvement of the planning. During the research phase of the project we met with a client of West, TNO. TNO explained they are performing research for the Dutch navy to create software that assists planners in creating schedules for battleships. With this case problem in mind, we created a list of requirements our software product should adhere to. We discovered that the case problem West provided us with is a subset of the case problem TNO provided. This meant that if we created a model for the case problem of TNO, the model would work for the case problem of West as well. After the research phase was completed, we started development on the software product. The development phase consisted of seven weeks, and in each week new functionalities were added to the product. In addition to adding new functionalities, we also kept refining our models to improve the performance of the automatic planning generation. The final software product consists of an interface that visualises a planning, a model that can be entered into external algorithms to automatically generate plannings and a module that allows users to import existing projects from Odoo. The user can view their planning through a visualisation that allows them to modify it using a drag and drop interaction. These modifications are setting preferences, like starting times for activities or the assignment of certain persons to certain activities. Once the user has set their preferences, they can ask the software to find an optimised planning that keeps their preferences in mind. At the end of the project, we gave a demo to TNO and they were impressed with the results of the project. West IT was also happy with the delivered product and is interested in further developing it

District heating systems (DHS) are considered the best alternative to individual heat boilers as they have higher efficiency and enable the use of sustainable heat sources, like geothermal heat sources or waste heat from industry. Currently, most DHSs are operated by choosing a temperature once every day depending on the weather. This setting is chosen such that peak demand can be satisfied. However, when demand is lower, the supply temperature will be higher than necessary and heat will be wasted. In addition to this, heat production costs can be dynamic over time, which allows more cost-efficient heat production scheduling. By choosing a dynamic temperature over the day losses and operating costs can be reduced. However, determining these dynamic temperatures is not easy, as there are several factors that need to be taken into account to ensure that demand can always be fulfilled. In this research, the use of metaheuristics is explored for finding supply temperatures. Optimisation of DHS operations results in up to 5% savings with respect to typical heating curve operations. The second contribution is a method to determine a theoretical lower bound on the operating costs of a DHS, as this was not yet found in literature.