A hybrid evolutionary algorithm for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is an NP-hard optimization problem. RCPSP is one of the most important and challenging problems in the project management field. In the past few years, many researches have been proposed for solving the RCPSP. The objective of this problem is to schedule the activities under limited resources so that the project makespan is minimized. This paper proposes a new algorithm for solving RCPSP that combines the concepts of negative selection mechanism of the biologic immune system, simulated annealing algorithm (SA), tabu search algorithm (TS) and genetic algorithm (GA) together. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared to current state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms. In this study, the benchmark data sets used in testing the performance of the proposed algorithm are obtained from the project scheduling problem library. The performance is measured in terms of the average percentage deviation from the critical path lower bound. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms on all standard benchmark data sets. © 2012 ISAROB.