A Heuristic Method for the Multi-skill Project Scheduling Problem with Partial Preemption

Abstract

In this article we consider a new scheduling problem known as the Multi-Skill Project Scheduling Problem with Partial Preemption. The main characteristic of this problem is the way we handle the resources release during the preemption periods: only a subset of resources are released. Since this problem is NP-hard, we propose a greedy algorithm based on priority rules, modeling the subproblem of technicians allocation as a Minimum-Cost Maximum-Flow problem. In order to improve the performance of the greedy algorithm, we propose a randomized tree-based local search algorithm. Computational tests are carried out and analyzed.