An ant colony optimization (ACO) approach for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is presented. Several new features that are interesting for ACO in general are proposed and evaluated. In particular, the use of a combination of two pheromone evaluation methods by the ants to find new solutions, a change of the influence of the heuristic on the decisions of the ants durin...

This paper describes new simulated annealing (SA) algorithms for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) and its multiple mode version (MRCPSP). The objective function considered is minimisation of the makespan. The conventional SA search scheme is replaced by a new design that takes into account the specificity of the solution space of project scheduling problems. For RCPSP...

This paper introduces a hybrid evolutionary algorithm for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). Given an RCPSP instance, the algorithm identifies the problem structure and selects a suitable decoding scheme. Then a multi-pass biased sampling method followed up by a multi-local search is used to generate a diverse and good quality initial population. The population then ev...

This paper presents a heuristic algorithm for solving RCPSP/max, the resource constrained project scheduling problem with generalized precedence relations. The algorithm relies, at its core, on a constraint satisfaction problem solving (CSP) search procedure, which generates a consistent set of activity start times by incrementally removing resource conflicts from an otherwise temporally feasib...

This paper proposes an iterative improvement approach for solving the Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problem with Time-Windows (RCPSP/max), a well-known and challenging NP-hard scheduling problem. The algorithm is based on Iterative Flattening Search (IFS), an effective heuristic strategy for solving multi-capacity optimization scheduling problems. Given an initial solution, IFS iterati...

Project scheduling is the part of project management that deals with determining when intime to start (and finish) which activities and with the allocation of scarce resources to theproject activities. In practice, virtually all project managers are confronted with resourcescarceness. In such cases, the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP)arises. This optimization problem has...