Resource-confidence-considered Robust Project Scheduling Algorithm for Cross-enterprise Project

Abstract

Higher resources uncertainty and requirement of schedule robustness are key characteristics of cross-enterprise project scheduling. For this problem, some conceptions of re- source confidence are defined to measure the resource uncer- tainty, and a robustness optimization model for cross-enterprise project scheduling is developed which considers the special con- straint of resource confidence. A path relinking based project scheduling approach is presented. Firstly, the approach searches the solution space employing path relinking technique. Then, it embeds a heuristic time bufer insertion algorithm to quickly generate robust project schedule. If needed, a local enhanced search algorithm can be used to further improve the schedule robustness. The proposed approach has been tested on the stan- dard instances in PSPLIB, and compared with two well-known competitive algorithms. Experimental results have shown that the new proposed approach is highly efective and efcient for cross-enterprise project scheduling.