Scheduling resource-constrained project problem with alternative activity chains

This research introduces a problem called resource-constrained project scheduling problem with alternative activity chains, which is inspired from project scheduling practice. An AND-OR project network representation is designed for the problem and then an integer linear program is developed. An extended simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to solve the large-scale problem efficiently, which consists of new activity-selection list solution presentation, schedule generation scheme and neighbor generation mechanism. Computational experiments are carried out to validate the proposed model and to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.