Article ID: | iaor20083698 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 175 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 279 |
End Page Number: | 295 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2006 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Kim David S., Buddhakulsomsiri Jirachai |
Keywords: | scheduling, programming: branch and bound |
This paper presents results from an extensive computational study of the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem when activities can be split during scheduling under situations where resources may be temporarily not available. All resources considered are renewable and each resource unit may not be available at all times due to resource vacations, which are known in advance, and assignment to other finite duration activities. A designed experiment is conducted that investigates project makespan improvement when activity splitting is permitted in various project scenarios, where different project scenarios are defined by parameters that have been used in the research literature. A branch-and-bound procedure is applied to solve a number of small project scheduling problems with and without activity splitting. The results show that, in the presence of resource vacations and temporary resource unavailability, activity splitting can significantly improve the optimal project makespan in many scenarios, and that the makespan improvement is primarily dependent on those parameters that impact resource utilization.