Scheduling NPD Projects based on a Boosted Particle Swarm Optimization

For reducing the required development time and offering the new product faster, the efficient scheduling of the New Product Development (NPD) projects is important. Task overlapping is commonly regarded as the most promising strategy to reduce product development times. However, overlapping must be well planned by weighting the gain from the task overlapping against the additional time for rework. The objective of this research is to develop a resource constrained scheduling methodology for NPD projects considering overlapping of task couples. In this paper, a Boosted Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) is used to schedule NPD projects that includes overlapping process. In addition, two local search approaches have been developed to provide an optimal scheduling. The results of these approaches are better than the previous approaches.

Keywords:

Particle swarm optimization , Resource constrained project scheduling , New product development