Efficient priority rules for project scheduling under dynamic environments: A heuristic approach

Abstract

This paper aims to identify an efficient priority rule (PR) for resource constrained project scheduling problems under dynamic environments. Here, the dynamicity comes from the unstable resource availability, time-varying resource demands and stochastic activity durations for each of the project activities. This extended dynamic project scheduling problem is solved by using a proposed Variable Neighbourhood Search Based Local Search Heuristic (VNSLSH). Six PRs are then integrated with the proposed heuristic to identify the best rule. Standard sets of 5760 and 7200 generated test instances with 30 and 120 activities are considered for experimentation. The influence of the variation of activity durations and risk or uncertainty levels on the algorithm’s performance is analysed and discussed. After analysing several PR-based heuristics, this study concludes that no one of the taken PR is dominant over others under this dynamic project scheduling environment.