A Novel Petri-Net Based Resource Constrained Multi-project Scheduling Method

This work proposes an extended Petri-Nets for resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). Several important issues about Petri-Nets on RCPSP are discussed in this paper. Firstly, the most important elements in Petri-Nets on RCPSP, including waiting place, activity place, resource place and final place, are designed. At the same time, three kinds of transitions are designed. They are coordination transition, resource allocating transition and resource releasing transition. Secondly, the Petri-Nets are improved according to the varying with increase or decrease of the number of resource acquisition. In this extended Petri-net, for the foremost difference with conventional Petri-Nets is to add a place and replace a releasing transition by the delaying transition and the firing rules of transition. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate the performances of the proposed Petri-Nets against the state-of-art algorithms. The simulation experimental results of difference sides showed that extended Petri-Nets provides a more efficient way to solve RCPSP and produces competitive results compared with other methods investigated in this works.