The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has been widely studied. A fundamental assumption of the basic type of RCPSP is that activity durations are deterministic (i.e., they are known in advance). In reality, however, this is almost never the case. In this article we illustrate why it is important to incorporate activity duration uncertainty, and develop an exact procedure to optimally solve the stochastic resource-constrained scheduling problem (SRCPSP). A computational experiment shows that our approach works best when solving small-to medium-sized problem instances where activity durations have a moderate-to-high level of variability. For this setting, our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art. In addition, we use our model to assess the optimality gap of existing heuristic approaches, and investigate the impact of making scheduling decisions also during the execution of an activity rather than only at the end of an activity.
We study the stochastic resourceconstrained project scheduling problem or SRCPSP, where project activities have stochastic durations. A solution is a scheduling policy, and we propose a new class of policies that is a generalization of most of the classes described in the literature. A policy in this new class makes a number of a-priori decisions in a preprocessing phase while the remaining scheduling decisions are made online. A two-phase local search algorithm is proposed to optimize within the class. Our computational results show that the algorithm has been efficiently tuned towards finding high-quality solutions, and that it outperforms all existing algorithms for large instances. The results also indicate that the optimality gap even within the larger class of elementary policies is very small.
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