Evolutionary multi-objective resource allocation and scheduling in the Chinese navigation satellite system project

The development of appropriate project management techniques for Research and Development (R&D) projects has received significant academic and practical attention over the past few decades. Project managers typically face the problem of allocating resources and scheduling activities, for which the underlying combinatorial problem is NP-hard. The inherent uncertainty in many R&D environments increases the complexity of the problem. This paper addresses the problem of resource allocation and activity scheduling with a focus on R&D projects. The work is different from the existing literature in at least three aspects: (1) the problem formulation is based on a real-world Chinese aerospace project, (2) each individual resource unit can have a different resource efficiency, and (3) the uncertainty of the duration of an activity is time-dependent (efficiency-dependent) in nature. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization model with simultaneous consideration of malcespan and balance of resource efficiency. A cooperative coevolutionary multi-objective algorithm (CC-MOA) is designed to produce high-quality solutions. Two chromosome representations and three resource selection policies are tested for the algorithm. The proposed CCMOA is found to be competitive when compared to MOEA/D and NSGA-II, which are two popular algorithms for multi-objective optimization. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.