Adaptive search for solving hard project scheduling problems

In this article the authors propose a new heuristic solution technique for resource-constrained project scheduling problems. Basically, it is a hybrid of priority rule and random search techniques which employs two types of adaptations in order to determine the solution space. The authors enhance this general scheme by the use of a new priority rule and by lower bounding techniques. The method is evaluated by comparing it with other recently proposed heuristics on a widely used set of benchmark-instances. Furthermore, the authors show that the procedure can be usefully applied to solve different hard problems within the field of project scheduling.