Apply Metaheuristic ANGEL to Schedule Multiple Projects with Resource-Constrained and Total Tardy Cost

In this paper the multiple projects resource-constrained project scheduling problem is considered. Several projects are to be scheduled simultaneously with sharing several kinds of limited resources in this problem. Each project contains non-preemptive and deterministic duration activities which compete limited resources under resources and precedence constraints. Moreover, there are the due date for each project and the tardy cost per day that cause the penalty when the project cannot be accomplished before its due date. The objective is to find the schedules of the considered projects to minimize the total tardy cost subject to the resource and precedence constraints. Since the resource-constrained project scheduling problem has been proven to be NP-Hard, we cannot find a deterministic algorithm to solve this problem efficiently and metaheuristics or evolutionary algorithms are developed for this problem instead. The problem considered in this paper is harder than the original problem because the due date and tardy cost of a project are considered in addition. The metaheuristic method called ANGEL was applied to this problem. ANGEL combines ant colony optimization (ACO), genetic algorithm (GA) and local search strategy. In ANGEL, ACO and GA run alternately and cooperatively. ANGEL performs very well in the multiple projects resource-constrained project scheduling problem as revealed by the experimental results.

@article{Chen2015,
  title     = {Apply Metaheuristic ANGEL to Schedule Multiple Projects with Resource-Constrained and Total Tardy Cost},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {6},
  number    = {3},
  year      = {2015},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Shih-Chieh Chen and Ching-Chiuan Lin},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060307},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060307}
}