A project scheduling algorithm for the formation of virtual enterprises

This paper deals with the multi-mode multiple resource-constrained project scheduling problem, which is abstracted from modeling the formation process of virtual enterprises of agile manufacturing in the next century. Different from the problem already investigated by other researchers, the problem handled in this paper is of variable resource requirement and renewable resource availability constraints. As an extension to the famous DH-procedure, the branch-and-bound algorithm in this paper can solve this kind of most general project scheduling problems with optimality.