Minimizing the expected makespan of a project with stochastic activity durations under resource constraints

International audienceThe resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has been widely studied. A fundamental assumption of the basic type of RCPSP is that activity durations are deterministic (i.e., they are known in advance). In reality, however, this is almost never the case. In this article, we illustrate why it is important to incorporate activity duration uncertainty, and develop an exact procedure to optimally solve the stochastic resource-constrained scheduling problem. A computational experiment shows that our approach works best when solving small- to medium-sized problem instances where activity durations have a moderate-to-high level of variability. For this setting, our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art. In addition, we use our model to assess the optimality gap of existing heuristic approaches, and investigate the impact of making scheduling decisions also during the execution of an activity rather than only at the end of an activity