The performance of priority rules for the decentralized resource-constrained multi-project scheduling

Decentralized resource-constrained multi-project scheduling (DRCMPSP) is becoming increasingly common in construction, supply chains, and many other industrial disciplines. DRCMPSP faces difficult decisions in resolving resource conflicts to generate a baseline schedule to optimize global objectives. We propose an agent-based approach to address the DRCMPSP based on two global objectives: average project delay and total project delay. A heuristic based on the priority rule (PR) is developed to coordinate the global resource allocation. A comprehensive analysis of 30 PRs was conducted on 16,000 portfolios containing 48,000 projects. We confirmed that using the same PR to allocate global resources on all occasions often results in unnecessarily poor performance. The best PR depends on project and portfolio characteristics such as serial/parallel indicators, global resource distribution, and tightness. Moreover, the best PR differs from various perspectives (e.g., projects and portfolios). We summarized our results in three decision tables and further distilled these results for practical use, which only provide a rough estimate of the project and portfolio characteristics. © 2024 Elsevier B.V.