Proactive heuristic procedures for robust project scheduling: An experimental analysis

Solution-robust project scheduling is a growing research field aiming at constructing proactive schedules to cope with multiple disruptions during project execution. When stochastic activity durations are considered, including time buffers between activities is a proven method to improve the stability of a baseline schedule. This paper introduces multiple algorithms to include time buffers in a given schedule while a predefined project due date remains respected. Multiple efficient heuristic and meta-heuristic procedures are proposed to allocate buffers throughout the schedule. An extensive simulation-based analysis of the performance of all algorithms is given. The impact of the activity duration variance structure on the performance is discussed in detail. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.