Integration of routing into a resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Abstract

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), one of the most challenging combinatorial optimization scheduling problems, has been the focus of a great deal of research, resulting in numerous publications in the last decade. Previous publications focused on the RCPSP, including several extensions with different objectives to be minimized and constraints to be checked. The present work investigates the integration of the routing, i.e., the transport of the resources between activities into the RCPSP, and provides a new resolution scheme. The two subproblems are solved using an integrated approach that draws on both a disjunctive graph model and an explicit modeling of the routing. The resolution scheme takes advantage of an indirect representation of the solution to define both the schedule of activities and the routing of vehicles. The routing solution is modeled by a set of trips that define the loaded transport operations of vehicles that are induced by the flow in the graph. The numerical experiments prove that the models and the methods introduced in this paper are promising for solving the RCPSP with routing.