A resource constrained project scheduling problem with reattempt at failure: A heuristic approach

Abstract

This article considers a new type of scheduling problem for a research and development (R& D) project, which consists of more than one activity with uncertainty. When an activity is finished, we take a functional test to justify whether it is successful or not. If unsuccessful, the activity will be reattempted once more in one of the different combinations of resources and duration depending on failure type. In our problem, we assume that each activity may be performed in one of the various resource-duration modes. The objective of this paper is to propose a heuristic approach, including two dispatching rules which contain six policies, and find the best policy with which the quasi-minimum expected project duration of our problem can be obtained. A statistical procedure is used to choose the policy with the smallest expected project duration. Furthermore, we use a posterior analysis to evaluate the proposed algorithm with the selected policy.