Integrated resource management for simultaneous project selection and scheduling

Nowadays, resource management is one of the most critical decision making processes in project-oriented companies. To reach the highest level of profitability, these companies should consider profiting from available projects and optimal management of their (renewable and nonrenewable) resources in terms of selection and scheduling of the most optimal project portfolio. In this regard, this paper presents the Integrated Resource Management (IRM) approach for simultaneous project selection and scheduling. A mixed-integer programming model is also proposed for the approach. To solve the research problem, first a heuristic algorithm is developed for generating feasible initial solutions; then a method for improving the resulted solutions is presented based on Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA). Finally, the proposed method is compared with Lingo on a set of 270 test problems. The comparison demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms Lingo in most cases and has less time complexity. Also, it will be shown that using IRM approach in test problems improves average profitability by 13.2%. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.