Evolutionary Algorithm for the Earliness - Tardiness Project Scheduling Problem

Abstract

Completing too early or too late can cause damage to the project. For example, in transporting goods to the seaports, if the shipping arrives too early, it will take time and cost to stay at the dock. In the other case, shipping too late will reduce the quality of the product and break the contract. The goal of this paper is to minimize the tardiness and earliness of those projects. First, some related studies are briefly introduced, thereby showing the role and practical applications of the MS-RCPSP (Multi-Skill Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem) problem and the two factors of earliness and delay in scheduling problems. The roles of earliness and tardiness in scheduling problems are also described. At the same time, the new contribution of this research is also highlighted, which is the proposal for the latest problem E-RCPSP (Earliness tardiness MS-RCPSP). This problem is the first problem in the MS-RCPSP family that considers the sum of earliness and tardiness as the objective, which has never been considered in previous studies. Then, the mathematical model of the proposed E-RCPSP problem, which includes the objective function, project components and constraints is introduced. To solve the proposed problem, two approximate algorithms based on the evolutionary algorithms GA (Genetic Algorithm) and DE (Differential Evolution) are introduced. In the last section of the article, the performance of these two algorithms is verified and compared with each other through experiments conducted on the iMOPSE benchmark dataset.}\Keywords{Network Resources Management, Earliness-Tardiness cost, Resource-constrained project scheduling, Evolutionary Algorithms, Differential evolution algorithms.