Review of recent advances on the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Abstract

At the heart of project management lies the project scheduling problem, which involves arranging a set of activities within a project to ensure timely completion. The majority of works on the project scheduling problem focus on a variant called the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), considering limited resource availability. The standard RCPSP is known as an NP-hard problem and has attracted significant attention from researchers. Moreover, practical engineering requirements add further complexity to the problem, prompting additional assumptions and various extensions. In this survey, the PRISMA model is adopted to review recent advances on the RCPSP. The main purpose of this study is not only to provide researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive taxonomy and overview of the common extensions of the RCPSP but also to identify existing limitations and propose potential research directions in project scheduling. We investigate 268 journal articles between 2010 and 2024, and identify three main categories: multi-skilled RCPSP, RCPSPs under uncertainty, and the multi-project RCPSP. For each category, statistical analyses and summaries of model types and assumptions, solution approaches are presented. Finally, we provide insights into future research directions in the RCPSP.