Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Reactive Scheduling Problem With New Project Arrival

Reactive project scheduling is an important branch of project scheduling under uncertainty. This paper proposes a resource-constrained multi-project reactive scheduling problem (RCMPRSP) with new project arrival to minimize the adjustment cost of the baseline schedule while achieving the deterministic multi-project scheduling goal. Although the RCMPRSP aims to minimize the adjustment cost, it adds a constraint to ensure that the reactive schedule is one of the schedules with shortest possible make-span after new project arrival. Therefore, the make-span and cost can both be optimized during when the multi-project schedule must be reactive scheduled due to new project arrival. Therefore, this scheduling problem has two stages. In the first stage, the shortest make-span is obtained by fully rescheduling the multi-project after new project arrival. If the new project has a higher priority, the new project will be prioritized for implementation. Otherwise, the new project will be delayed. In the second stage, the multi-project is rescheduled to minimize the adjustment cost of the baseline schedule after new project arrival. The exact solution is implemented on IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio. It is found in the experiments that the CPLEX execution efficiency is acceptable for activity numbers below 80. The results of computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed method has distinct advantages over existing methods.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a resource-constrained multi-project reactive scheduling problem with new project arrival to minimize the adjustment cost and achieve the deterministic multi-project scheduling goal. The scheduling problem has two stages, involving obtaining the shortest make-span and minimizing the adjustment cost. The computational experiments demonstrate the distinct advantages of the proposed method over existing methods.