[js8]

IMHO Kanban in the computing industry is an analogue of typical task scheduling algorithm on the CPU. Instead of planning the work ahead, you have a work queue and you work each item from it until either the work itself becomes blocked, or (if you're timeboxing/preempting) a fixed period of time expires.

But more generally to the poster's question - like the example above, I think there is a lot in the project management space that was already solved by computer scientists. :-)