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New competitive results for the stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling problem: exploring the benefits of pre-processing

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Abstract

We study the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with stochastic activity durations. We introduce a new class of scheduling policies for solving this problem, which make a number of a-priori sequencing decisions in a pre-processing phase while the remaining decisions are made dynamically during project execution. The pre-processing decisions entail the addition of extra precedence constraints to the scheduling instance, hereby resolving some potential resource conflicts. We obtain new competitive results for expected-makespan minimization on representative datasets, which are significantly better than those obtained by the existing algorithms when the variability in the activity durations is medium to high.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Behzad Ashtiani & Mir-Bahador Aryanezhad

  2. Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Roel Leus

Authors
  1. Behzad Ashtiani
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  2. Roel Leus
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  3. Mir-Bahador Aryanezhad
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Correspondence to Roel Leus.

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Ashtiani, B., Leus, R. & Aryanezhad, MB. New competitive results for the stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling problem: exploring the benefits of pre-processing. J Sched 14, 157–171 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-009-0143-7

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