An efficient algorithm for the multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem with resource flexibility

Abstract

The scheduling problem under study may be viewed as an extension of the standard multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP) including multi-skilled labour and will be called as MRCPSP-MS. This problem requires an integration of resource limitation, labour skills and multiple possible execution modes for each task, and the objective is to minimise the overall project duration. This paper present a new tabu search (TS) algorithm using a powerful neighbourhood function based on a flow graph representation in order to implement various search strategies. The search of the solution space is carried out via two types of moves. Furthermore, the TS algorithm is embedded in a decomposition-based heuristic (DBH) which serve to reduce the solution space. The effectiveness of the new TS is demonstrated through extensive experimentation on different standard benchmark problem instances and proves that our results are competitive.