Integrated multi-project planning and scheduling - a multiagent approach

Abstract

Today’s project organisations are conducting their daily activities for multi-projects where a group of scarce resources are shared amongst several parallel projects. In addition, due to the implementation of lean and agile production, they have consumed more and more resources from external environment (i.e., non-regular resources) when performing projects. Therefore, how to effectively schedule the shared resources across projects and meanwhile optimally plan the required capacities of non-regular resources for an entire multi-project becomes a critical problem for project organisations. This paper proposes a multi-agent approach to address the resource planning and scheduling decisions of the problem in an integrated manner. In this work, a multi-project is represented as a hierarchical multi-agent system consisting of a multi-project portfolio agent (MPA), a resource agent (RA) and a set of project agents (PAs). Decisions are made by these agents through a hierarchical coordination mechanism. Basically, the decision of resource planning for a multi-project is obtained from the resource requirements proposed by projects in their scheduling decisions which are coordinated by MPA through controlling the allocation of shared resources to projects. The scheduling decision of each project is made by its PA using the model of multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem. A genetic algorithm and an ant colony optimisation algorithm are proposed for decision optimisations of resource planning and project scheduling, respectively. A numerical study demonstrated that the proposed approach can effectively solve the multi-project problem by producing near-optimal solutions.