Finding the Shortest Non-Delay Schedule for a Resource-Constrained Project

Yuval Cohen, Arik Sadeh and Ofer Zwikael
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Yuval Cohen: Department of Industrial Engineering, Tel-Aviv Afeka College of Engineering, Open University of Israel, Tel-Aviv, Israel
Arik Sadeh: Technology Management Department, Holon Academic Institute of Technology, Holon, Israel
Ofer Zwikael: Research School of Management, Marketing and International Business, College of Business and Economics, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

International Journal of Operations Research and Information Systems (IJORIS), 2012, vol. 3, issue 4, 41-58

Abstract: Non-delay schedules lack non-essential idle time intervals. Many heuristics for solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem yield non-delay schedules. This paper presents a technique for finding the shortest non-delay schedule, which should be as good as the heuristics for this purpose. The authors combine branch-and-bound and dynamic programming approaches to yield a surprisingly simple algorithm. (The simplicity is reflected in the number of calculations and memory required.) Due to its simplicity, a project manager should be able to trace the algorithm’s stages and results without difficulty. This simplicity is a result of: (1) the number of stages equals the number of activities; (2) each stage uses only information from the previous stage, and the number of different schedules is typically limited; and (3) the proposed method becomes simpler the more it is constrained. A detailed example illustrates the technique, which is validated by comparisons to models from the literature.

Date: 2012
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