Some appraisal criteria for multi-mode scheduling problem

Abstract

Scheduling and managing projects are very important and hot topics in project management science. Multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MM-RCPSP) is a RCPSP with special features in which each activity may be executed in more than one mode. Each mode has different options of cost, execution time, resources availabilities, and resources requirements. There are many well known measuring criteria related to the complexity and performance measures for scheduling projects, especially for the single mode projects. In this paper, two selection criteria for dealing with multi-mode resource constrained projects were suggested. According to these selection criteria, some well-known complexity and performance measures were modified for dealing with multi-mode projects. Five single-mode projects and five multi-mode projects are considered as test problems for applying the modified complexity and performance measures based on the suggested selection criteria. The obtained results rendered by the suggested selection criteria for test problems are compared by the existing criteria measures and the results are in the same trend and very promising. Also, we proposed new complexity measures and performance measures for MMRCP. The proposed complexity and performance measures also applied to the test problems. The obtained results rendered by the proposed complexity and performance measures are tested against the results obtained by existing complexity and performance measures. The new results are also promising and having the same trends.