A Novel Heuristic Approach for Multimode Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems

Multimode project scheduling problem has significant application in project-based organizations. It is NP-hard (Non-Polynomial) problem and therefore, several heuristic and meta heuristic techniques are employed in literature to solve these problems. Current research proposes a novel heuristic approach for multimode resource constrained project scheduling (MMRCPS). The suggested heuristic introduces some efficient techniques which simultaneously optimizes the resource utilization and activity mode selection. The heuristic is designed for makespan minimization. Furthermore, it incorporates certain activity shifting techniques which reduces makespan of the project. The proposed heuristic is tested on benchmark instances taken from PSPLIB (Project scheduling problem library) and a comparison is performed against optimal results. The proposed heuristic gives competent results on comparison with optimal results in literature.

Keywords:

project scheduling , multi-mode problem , NP-hard , heuristic , makespan minimization