The impact of various activity assumptions on the lead time and resource utilization of resource-constrained projects

The well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) schedules project activities within the precedence and renewable resource constraints while minimizing the total lead-time of the project. The basic problem description assumes non-pre-emptive activities with fixed durations, and has been extended to various other assumptions in literature. In this paper, we investigate the effect of three activity assumptions on the total lead-time and the total resource utilization of a project. More precisely, we investigate the influence of variable activity durations under a fixed work content, the possibility of allowing activity pre-emption and the use of fast tracking to decrease a project's duration. We give an overview of the procedures developed in literature and present some modifications to existing solution approaches to cope with our activity assumptions under study. We present computational results on a generated dataset and evaluate the impact of all assumptions on the quality of the schedule.