A polyhedral study of event-based models for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

In this paper, we study event-based mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulations for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) that represent an alternative to the more common time-indexed model (DDT) (Pritsker et al. in Manag Sci 16(1):93–108, 1969; Christofides et al. in Eur J Oper Res 29(3):262–273, 1987) for the case when the scheduling horizon is large. In contrast to time-indexed models, the size of event-based models does not depend on the time horizon. For two event-based models OOE and SEE introduced by Koné et al. (Comput Oper Res 38(1):3–13, 2011), we first present new valid inequalities that strengthen the original formulation. Furthermore, we state a new event-based model, the Interval Event-Based Model (IEE), and deduce natural linear transformations between all three models. Those transformations yield the strict domination order $$IEE \succ SEE \succ OOE$$IEE≻SEE≻OOE for their respective linear programming relaxations, meaning that the new IEE model has the strongest linear relaxation among all known event-based models. In addition, we show that DDT can be retrieved from IEE by subsequent expansion and projection of the underlying solution space. This yields a unified polyhedral view on a complete branch of MIP models for the RCPSP. Finally, we also compare the computational performance between all models on common test instances of the PSPLIB (Kolisch and Sprecher in Eur J Oper Res 96(1):205–216, 1997).