An effective heuristic for project scheduling with resource availability cost

Xia Zhu, Rubén Ruiz, Shiyu Li and Xiaoping Li

European Journal of Operational Research, 2017, vol. 257, issue 3, 746-762

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.

Keywords: Project scheduling; Heuristic; Resource availability cost (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221716306889
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:257:y:2017:i:3:p:746-762

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2016.08.049

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().