Project scheduling for minimizing temporary availability cost of rental resources and tardiness penalty of activities

Abstract

This paper addresses the resource availability cost problem with rental resources where each activity has a given due date to be completed. In this problem setting, the required resources are temporarily rented to accomplish the corresponding activities where the paid fee for the rental resources depends on duration of their availability. In addition, each activity would be subjected to a tardiness penalty if its finish time surpasses its given due date. A mathematical model is presented for the problem and some features of its solution space are established. Also, a best-performed version of ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm based on Ant Colony System is developed to tackle this strongly NP-Hard problem. The proposed method consists a new compatible schedule generation scheme, a new resource based heuristic role and an efficient local search. In a comprehensive experimental effort, the proposed parameters-tuned approach is compared with the exact solutions obtained by GAMS on several small-scale instances, while results of a competitive metaheuristic based on Genetic Algorithm are employed to validate the developed ACO algorithm for the large-scale instances. Finally, effectiveness of the proposed ACO is analyzed using statistical tests and the impact of the crucial parameters on the resulting solutions is demonstrated.