A fast greedy heuristic for scheduling modular projects

This article describes a heuristic for scheduling so-called 'modular' projects. Exact solutions to this NP-hard problem can be obtained with existing branch-and-bound and dynamic-programming algorithms, but only for small to medium-size instances. The proposed heuristic, by contrast, can be used even for large instances, or when instances are particularly difficult because of their characteristics, such as a low network density. The proposed heuristic draws from existing results in the literature on sequential testing, which will be briefly reviewed. The performance of the heuristic is assessed over a dataset of 360 instances.