Scheduling of multiple projects with constrained resources and preemption

The resource‐constrained (single) project scheduling problem has been widely studied in literature. A common assumption in its basic version is that the execution of activities cannot be interrupted, that is activities are non‐preemptable. Very little effort has been made to analyse the impact of activity preemption. In addition, classical project scheduling models only consider the case of a single project. This paper considers the problem of scheduling multiple projects under the assumption of activities preemption. A heuristic algorithm is proposed and its performance is analysed using several well‐known priority rules. Computational experiments are carried out using the well‐known datasets from the PSP Library. Results show the advantages of incorporating activity preemption when scheduling multiple projects.