A Local Search Algorithm for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

Abstract: We consider the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). The problemaccounts for technological constraints of activities precedence together with resource constraints.All resources are renewable. Activities interruptions are not allowed. This problem is NP-hard inthe strong sense. We present a new local search algorithm that uses a Tabu-list and two types ofneighborhoods. The algorithm is evaluated using three data bases of instances of the problem: 480instances of 60 activities, 480 of 90, and 600 of 120 activities, respectively, taken from the PSPLIBlibrary available online. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm producesbetter results than existing algorithms described in the literature for large-sized instances. Forsome instances from the dataset j120, the best known heuristic solutions were improved. © 2022, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.