Manuskripte Aus Den Instituten F Ur Betriebswirtschaftslehre Der Universit at Kiel Solving Multi-mode Resource-constrained Project Scheduling Problems by a Simple, General and Powerful Sequencing Algorithm. Part Ii: Computation

This is the second part of a paper considering the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem. The rst part presents an exact solution procedure for solving several variants of the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem including the commonly known makespan minimization problem. The basic scheme is enhanced by powerful search tree reduction schemes considerably useful when optimizing any regular measure of performance. The second part reports the results of a thorough computational study and the experience gained with the algorithm's realization. The procedure has been coded in C and implemented on a personal computer. Using the standard project generator ProGen we have established a wide range of instances. More than ten thousand problem instances have been systematically generated to evaluate the algorithm's performance. The experimental investigations demonstrate a superior performance of the exact method and reasonable capabilities of the truncated exact approach. The size of the projects that can be solved to optimality has been nearly doubled. The main objectives of this part are: First, to give additional information concerning implementation of the algorithm and the bounding rules. Second, to illustrate the e ect of the bounding rules. Third, to show the impact of the variation of several project characteristics on solution time and quality. Fourth, to enlarge the set of project instances available for testing multi-mode procedures.