Title: Integrated optimisation of the flexible resource workload balancing and investment project scheduling problem

Authors: Yifei Ren; Zhiqiang Lu

Addresses: School of Mechanical Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, No.4800 Caoan Road, 201804, China ' School of Mechanical Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, No.4800 Caoan Road, 201804, China

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the extension of the resource investment project scheduling problem: the flexible resource workload balancing and investment project scheduling problem (FRWBIP). The integrated optimisation of FRWBIP is established with the objective of minimising the weighted resource availability cost and workload balancing penalty. A heuristic algorithm is designed to obtain the upper and lower bounds of resource requirements. The skills of the flexible resources are effectively allocated by the minimum cost-maximum flow flexible resource allocation model. A genetic algorithm with an improved serial schedule generation scheme and the resource usage adjustment module is proposed to solve FRWBIP. Every individual of the population is constructed from two lists: the activity priority list and the resource capacity list. Finally, a series of computational experiments are carried out by using the modified standard example library PSPLIB, and the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified by comparison with other literature algorithm.

Keywords: flexible resources; workload balancing; resource investment; project scheduling problem; genetic algorithm.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMA.2018.094484

International Journal of Mechatronics and Automation, 2018 Vol.6 No.2/3, pp.71 - 82

Received: 18 Sep 2017
Accepted: 07 May 2018
Published online: 03 Sep 2018 *

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