Title: The total adjustment cost problem with variable activity durations and intensities

Authors: Lucio Bianco; Massimiliano Caramia; Stefano Giordani

Addresses: Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Impresa, Università di Roma 'Tor Vergata', Via del Politecnico, 1 – 00133 Roma, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Impresa, Università di Roma 'Tor Vergata', Via del Politecnico, 1 – 00133 Roma, Italy ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Impresa, Università di Roma 'Tor Vergata', Via del Politecnico, 1 – 00133 Roma, Italy

Abstract: In this paper, we study the resource levelling problem with the so called total adjustment cost objective. For this problem, we propose a mixed-integer program in which, besides standard ingredients, variable durations and variable execution intensities of the activities are allowed to further smooth the shape of the resource profile function over time. To the best of our knowledge, there is no similar model for this problem with this objective function since the total adjustment cost problem is typically tacked within the literature with fixed activity durations and fixed execution intensities. A computational experimentation on known benchmarks has been conducted. Moreover, a comparison with a competing and highly performing model present in the literature for the same problem with fixed durations and fixed execution intensities of the activities is presented, properly adapting our model to work with the same setting. [Received 2 October 2016; Revised 27 January 2017; Revised 30 June 2017; Accepted 24 September 2017]

Keywords: project scheduling; generalised precedence relationships; resource levelling.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2017.089106

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2017 Vol.11 No.6, pp.708 - 724

Received: 02 Oct 2016
Accepted: 24 Sep 2017

Published online: 05 Jan 2018 *

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