Recource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem: Investigation of the Quality of Project Plans

Human Competitiveness of an Evolutionary Metaheuristic
  • Sven Tackenberg
  • Sönke Duckwitz
  • Christina Schmalz
  • Christopher Marc Schlick
Conference paper
First Online:

Abstract

This paper introduces the results whether humans are able to develop project plans with a high quality for the well-established Multi-criteria Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). To analyse this, an empirical study was conducted in which activities had to be serialized or parallelized in the plan, process steps had to be inserted or removed and durations as well as resource requirements had to be modified dynamically during planning. In contrast to this human based planning, a specific multicriteria evolutionary metaheuristic is presented that identifies human compatible plans to relatively large project management problems within a reasonable period of time. To evaluate the level of human competitiveness, a metric for measuring plan quality and the results of the empirical study are presented. The results derived from data of 100 participants and the metaheuristic show that only very few people were able to identify optimal solutions. Furthermore, humans are focusing on one target criteria when solving conflicting planning objectives.

Keywords

Resource-constrained project scheduling problem Quality of project plans Project planning Multicriteria optimization 
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Notes

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research according to Grant No. 01FL10011 and was administered by PT-DLR. This support is gratefully acknowledged. The project WiDiPro (www.widipro.de) proposes the optimal development of a knowledge-intensive service provision for architects and consulting companies.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sven Tackenberg
    • 1
  • Sönke Duckwitz
    • 1
  • Christina Schmalz
    • 2
  • Christopher Marc Schlick
    • 1
  1. 1.Chair and Institute of Industrial Engineering and ErgonomicsAachenGermany
  2. 2.Deutsche Post Lehrstuhl für Optimierung von DistributionsnetzwerkenAachenGermany

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