A priority rule for scheduling shared due dates in the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Abstract

In resource-constrained project scheduling, project milestones, rental equipment, contracted labor, and product development checkpoints all conceptually impose shared due dates, which expand the concept of conventional due dates by permitting their assignment to sets of activities and by allowing multiple shared due date assignments, or none at all, to a single activity. Existing heuristic algorithms in the literature that solve the resource-constrained project scheduling problem are agnostic to shared due dates and cannot utilize information about their assignments in making scheduling decisions. To this end, we propose a novel priority rule compatible with both serial and parallel schedule generation schemes that integrates shared due date information into the heuristic scheduling decisions. We evaluate the effectiveness of our priority rule by demonstrating its dominance over existing priority rules in the literature and by comparing its performance with an exact algorithm. In comparing with the latter, we demonstrate both the computational efficiency of the heuristic as well as the quality of the solutions it produces.