An ABC-Genetic method to solve resource constrained project scheduling problem

Abstract

The aim of this work is to study the effect of hybridization on the performance of the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) as arecently introduced metaheuristic for solving Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). For thispurpose the ABC is combined with the Genetic Algorithm (GA). At the initial time, the algorithm generates a set ofschedules randomly. The initial solution is evaluated against constraints and the infeasible solutions are resolved tofeasible ones. Then, the initial schedules will be improved iteratively using hybrid method until termination condition ismet. The proposed method works by interleaving the ABC and GA search processes. The GA method updates schedulesby considering the best solution found by the ABC approach. Next the ABC approach picks the solutions found by GAsearch. A new approach is used by the algorithm to maintain the priorities of the activities in feasible ranges. Theperformance of the proposed algorithm is compared against a set of state-of-art algorithms. The simulation results showedthat the proposed algorithm provides an efficient way for solving RCPSP and produce competitive results compared toother algorithms investigated in this work.