Branch-and-bound style resource constrained scheduling using efficient structure-aware pruning

Abstract

Branch-and-bound approaches are promising in pruning infeasible search space during the resource constrained scheduling (RCS). However, such methods only compare the estimated upper and lower bounds of an incomplete schedule to the length of the best feasible schedule at that iteration. This paper proposes an efficient pruning technique which can identify the fruitless search space based on the detailed structural scheduling information of the obtained best feasible schedule. The proactive nature of our pruning technique enables the pruning of the space which cannot be identified by the state-of-the-art branch-and-bound techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can drastically (up to two orders-of-magnitude) reduce the overall RCS time under a wide variety of resource constraints.