A project scheduling problem with labour constraints and time-dependent activities requirements

We consider in this paper a project scheduling problem where resources are employees and activity requirements are time-dependent. Furthermore, employees have different skills and legal constraints dictated by the French workforce legislation have to be respected. The project has to be scheduled and employees have to be assigned to activities, so that most of the constraints are respected and the maximal lateness is minimized. We first give a linear programming formulation of the problem. Then, greedy algorithms are proposed to give an approximate solution to the problem. These methods give an initial solution to a Tabu search algorithm. Finally, computational experiments are conducted and results are discussed. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.