Resource-constrained project scheduling problem with work pro A genetic algorithm approach

Abstract. This paper deals with the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with exible work proles. In this problem, a project contains activities interrelated by nish-start-type precedence constraints with a time lag of zero. In many real-life projects, however, it often occurs that only one renewable bottleneck resource is available and that activities do not have a xed prespecied duration and associated resource requirement, but a total work content, which essentially indicates how much work has to be performed on them. Based on this work content, all feasible work proles have to be specied for the activities, each characterized by a xed duration and a resource requirement prole. The task of the problem is to nd the optimum work prole and start time of each activity in order to minimize the project makespan. We propose a procedure to nd all feasible work proles of each activity and we use a genetic algorithm with a new crossover operator to schedule the activities. Computational results on a randomly generated problem set are presented