Abstract

In this paper the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem with discounted cash flows is considered. A project is represented by an activity-on-node (AoN) network. A positive cash flow is associated with each activity. Four different payment models are considered: lump-sum payment at the completion of the project, payments at activities' completion times, payments at equal time intervals and progress payments. The objective is to maximize the net present value of all cash flows of the project. Local search metaheuristics: simulated annealing and tabu search are proposed to solve this strongly NP-hard problem. A comprehensive computational experiment is described, performed on a set of instances based on standard test problems constructed by the ProGen project generator, where, additionally, the activities' cash flows are generated randomly with the uniform distribution. The metaheuristics are computationally compared, the results are analyzed and discussed and some conclusions are given.

Author Keywords: Project management and scheduling; Multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem with discounted cash flows; Net present value; Simulated annealing; Tabu search

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

3. Problem formulation

3.1. Lump-sum payment

3.2. Payments at activities' completion times

3.3. Equal time intervals

3.4. Progress payments

4. Metaheuristics

4.1. Common features

4.1.1. Solution representation

4.1.2. Preprocessing

4.1.3. Objective function

4.1.4. Starting solution

4.1.5. Stop criterion

4.2. Simulated annealing

4.2.1. Neighbourhood

4.2.2. Cooling scheme

4.3. Tabu search

4.3.1. Neighbourhood

4.3.2. Moves

4.3.3. Tabu list

4.3.4. Restarting

5. Computational experiment

6. Conclusions

Acknowledgements

References