A new any-order schedule generation scheme for resource-constrained project scheduling

Abstract

In this paper, a new schedule generation scheme forresource-constrained project scheduling problems is proposed. Given aproject scheduling problem and a priority rule, a schedule generationscheme determines a single feasible solution by inserting one by oneeach activity, according to their priority, inside a partialschedule. The paper proposes a generation scheme that differs from theclassic ones in the fact that it allows to consider the activities inany order, whether their predecessors have already been scheduled ornot. Moreover, activity insertion is performed so that delaying somealready scheduled activities is allowed. The paper shows that thisstrategy remains polynomial and often gives better results than moreclassic ones. Moreover, it is also interesting in the fact that somepriority rules, which are quite poor when used with classic schedulegeneration schemes, become very competitive with the proposed schedulegeneration scheme.