A new approach for the multi-site resource-constrained project scheduling problem

In recent years, the study of Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem RCPSP which as a well-known NP-hard problem in project management and operational research is taking substantial interest. The present work investigates a new RCPSP extension in multi-site environments with resource pooling between different sites. This extension considers two types of resources: fixed and mobile resources. New constraints are taken into account like transfer times of mobile resources and the decision on which site a task is carried out. We propose a new Particle Swarm Optimization-based solution to deal with this RCPSP variant aiming at minimizing the total project Makespan. The proposed algorithm uses a Valid Particle Generator to produce feasible schedules. As well, inertia weight is adaptively tuned to realize a trade-off between diversification and intensification. Our solution has been tested on a set of newly created benchmarks to reveal very promising results. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the CENTERIS -International Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / ProjMAN - International Conference on Project MANagement / HCist - International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies.