A Solution-Based Tabu Search Algorithm for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Step Deterioration

This paper integrates the classical resource-constrained project scheduling problem with step deterioration and accordingly presents a solution-based tabu search (SB-TS) algorithm to solve it with challenging computations. First, we choose successor list size as the priority rule to generate the initial solution of the presented methods. Next, the corresponding solution decoding and calculation ways are defined to update the related configuration at each iteration. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of the known datasets, the proposed SB-TS finds the optimal solution for each instance in J30 and shows strongly competitive performance in J60, J90, and J120. Then, on newly generated datasets, where the step deterioration is attached to, the comparison experimental data state that the SB-TS with high-quality solution is superior to the move-based tabu search (MB-TS) algorithm. In addition, two key components are investigated to emphasize their attributions to the proposed algorithm.