Resource constrained project scheduling with flexible resource usage profiles: Models, Methods, and Applications

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The proposed research addresses the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) with flexible resource usage profiles. Such a problem often arises in many real-world applications, in which the resource usage profile of each activity is not merely constant, but may vary from period to period. As such, the activity duration cannot be known a priori. The challenge, thus, remains to simultaneously determine the schedule and resource usage profiles of each activity in order to optimize a certain objective, subject to precedence relationships, resource requirement and availability, usage bounds and block length, and coordinated usage for each activity that requires multiple resources. The proposed research pursues the three-fold missions, namely models, methods, and applications. Generalized models will be firstly formulated, while keeping in perspectives their relevancy and applicability to the real-world problems. Solution methods, both exact and heuristic methods will subsequently be devised to solve the formulated models. Finally, computational evaluations on their effectiveness and efficiency will be conducted on standard test problems and real-world industrial problems. As by-products, a library of standard test problems and industrial problems will be compiled. The effects of problem characteristics on the problem complexity and solution quality will also be investigated.