Project Scheduling with Time-Varying Resource Capacities and Generalized Precedence Relations

Abstract

As the size and complexity of the project increased in project management tasks, scheduling with the limited resources becomes one of the most challenging job. For this reason, the classic resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has been extensively studied. However, it is difficult to solve problems that occur in the real-world as restricted assumptions for resources and precedence relations of RCPSP. Therefore, we study the extended RCPSP that considers more evolved types of precedence relations as well as time-dependent resource capacities. We provide a mathematical model for this problem and prove that this problem belongs to NP-hard. Then, we propose priority rule based heuristic and ant colony optimization (ACO) which is one of the metaheuristics. Finally we report our computational results for the real cases as well as a set of generated test instances.