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An effective heuristic for project scheduling with resource availability cost

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  • Zhu, Xia
  • Ruiz, Rubén
  • Li, Shiyu
  • Li, Xiaoping

Abstract

The resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is widely studied in the literature and has a host of applications in practice. As a variant of the RCPSP, the resource availability cost problem (RACP), which has the aim of minimizing the availability costs of renewable resources in order to complete a project subject to a given deadline, is considered in this paper. We divide the RACP into two sub-problems: the sequencing problem and the resource decision problem, and propose a multi-start iterative search heuristic (MSIS) to solve it. For the sequencing problem, an iterative search framework is constructed to effectively search the activity sequences. A two stage resource adjustment procedure and a backward peak elimination procedure is developed for solving the resource decision problem. MSIS is compared with three existing algorithms on both PSPLib and RanGen data sets involving 1380 instances. A complete calibration of the different parameters and operators of MSIS by means of a design of experiments approach is given. Experimental and statistical results show that MSIS outperforms the other three algorithms in both effectiveness and efficiency by a significant margin.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhu, Xia & Ruiz, Rubén & Li, Shiyu & Li, Xiaoping, 2017. "An effective heuristic for project scheduling with resource availability cost," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 257(3), pages 746-762.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:257:y:2017:i:3:p:746-762
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2016.08.049
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    4. Patrick Gerhards, 2020. "The multi-mode resource investment problem: a benchmark library and a computational study of lower and upper bounds," OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research e.V., vol. 42(4), pages 901-933, December.

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