Title: Scheduling of multiple projects with constrained resources and preemption

Authors: Carlos A. Salazar-García; Jairo R. Montoya-Torres; Edgar H. Alfonso-Lizarazo

Addresses: Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de La Sabana, km 7 autopista norte de Bogotá D.C, Chía (Cundinamarca), Colombia ' Escuela Internacional de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas, Universidad de La Sabana, km 7 autopista norte de Bogotá D.C, Chía (Cundinamarca), Colombia ' Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de La Sabana, km 7 autopista norte de Bogotá D.C, Chía (Cundinamarca), Colombia

Abstract: The resource-constrained (single) project scheduling problem has been widely studied in literature. A common assumption in its basic version is that the execution of activities cannot be interrupted, that is activities are non-preemptable. Very little effort has been made to analyse the impact of activity preemption. In addition, classical project scheduling models only consider the case of a single project. This paper considers the problem of scheduling multiple projects under the assumption of activities preemption. A heuristic algorithm is proposed and its performance is analysed using several well-known priority rules. Computational experiments are carried out using the well-known datasets from the PSP Library. Results show the advantages of incorporating activity preemption when scheduling multiple projects.

Keywords: project scheduling; multiple projects; resource constraints; priority rules; activity preemption; heuristics; multi-project scheduling; resource-constrained scheduling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2016.078458

International Journal of Operational Research, 2016 Vol.27 No.1/2, pp.127 - 148

Received: 21 Oct 2013
Accepted: 25 Apr 2014
Published online: 22 Aug 2016 *

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