A RESOURCE OPTIMISATION BASED HEURISTIC FOR RESOURCE CONSTRAINED PROJECT SCHEDULING PROBLEM

Abstract

Resource constrained project scheduling problem has significant application in industries. Although several heuristic solutions have been developed in the literature to address this problem, most of these have lesser focus on scheduling of shared and scarce resources. The presented study proposes a resource optimisation based heuristic (ROBH) to optimise the utilisation of shared resources so as to minimise the penalty cost of projects. The proposed ROBH identifies shared resources within the project activities and shifts the activities from the bottleneck resource to the residual resources. The performance of the proposed ROBH was tested using the standard benchmark instances of project scheduling problems available in the existing literature. The results were compared with those obtained from the heuristics available in the project scheduling problem library. This comparison indicated that the results provided by ROBH are significant as compared to the results obtained from the heuristics available in the literature.