Exact and heuristic methods for the resource-constrained net present value problem

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. An important variant of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is to maximise the net present value. Significant progress has been made recently on this problem for both exact and inexact methods. The lazy clause generation based constraint programming approach is the state of the art among the exact methods and is briefly discussed. The performance of the Lagrangian relaxation based decomposition method is greatly improved when the forward-backward improvement heuristic is employed. A novel decomposition approach is designed for very large industrial problems which can make full use of the parallel computing capability of modern personal computers. Computational results are also presented to compare different approaches on both difficult benchmark problems and large industrial applications