Reactive Procedure for Robust Project Scheduling under the Activity Disruptions

Abstract

The baseline schedule may become infeasible when disruptions happen during the execution of project. This will lead to project delays and financial losses. In this paper, we developed a robust reactive optimization model. Our objective is to maximize the robustness of reactive schedule. Moreover, a robust reactive procedure is proposed for baseline schedule under a series of disruptions caused by activity duration. To test the proposed approach, sets of J60 and J90 instances from the Project Scheduling Library (PSPLIB) were used. Meanwhile, we tested the reactive project scheduling with the aim of minimizing makespan and compared the maximal robustness reactive schedule and the minimal makespan reactive schedule. We developed a reactive procedure involving genetic algorithm for reactive scheduling due to its non-deterministic polynomial hard (NP-hard). The results indicated that robust reactive scheduling has the advantage in maintaining the schedule’s ability of tolerating variabilities and reducing the impact of activity disruptions on the makespan. The research results can help project managers develop a robust schedule which can tolerate variabilities in a random environment.