Meta-heuristic resource-constrained project scheduling:solution space restrictions and neighbourhood extensions

D. Debels () and Mario Vanhoucke

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has been extensively investigated during the past decades. Due to its strongly NP-hard status and the need for solving large realistic project instances, the recent focus has shifted from exact optimisation procedures to (meta-) heuristic approaches. In this paper, we extend some existing state-of-the-art RCPSP procedures in two ways. First, we extensively test a decomposition approach that splits problem instances into smaller sub-problems to be solved with an (exact or heuristic) procedure, and re-incorporates the obtained solutions for the sub-problems into the solution of the main problem, possibly leading to an overall better solution. Second, we study the influence of an extended neighbourhood search on the performance of a meta-heuristic procedure. Computational results reveal that both techniques are valuable extensions and lead to improved results.

Keywords: Resource-constrained project scheduling; Problem decomposition; Meta-heuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2006-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-cmp
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:06/387

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