Managing Uncertainty and Disruptions in Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems: A Real-Time Reactive Approach

Abstract

Resource constrained project scheduling problems (RCPSPs) are complex optimization problems that aim to minimize project completion time after considering limited resources and precedence-related activities with known durations. However, due to the dynamic nature of real-world applications, activity durations are vulnerable to change. In addition, resource demands along with resource availability at any stage of a project can also vary due to disruptions, which compel practitioners to re-think existing scheduling methodologies. Consequently, to mitigate the conjoint effect of those uncertainties and/or disruptions, this paper proposes a real-time reactive scheduling approach. To deal with uncertain activity durations, a chance constrained based approach is followed, which is later solved by an advanced meta-heuristic based approaches called IGFBIS and IGFBID. After solving an exhaustive list of stochastic RCPSP instances, this paper proves the efficacy of the proposed approaches, which is proven to be more useful to mitigate uncertainty or disruption while executing real-life projects.