Smart Strategies for Project Scheduling: An Adaptive BR-DEH Approach

Abstract

In recent years, management of multiple complex projects has become increasingly common among large-scale companies, posing significant challenges for company managers. These projects are often identified by numerous tasks that have precedence relations and share a set of limited resources. The main goal of project scheduling is to minimize the total time required to complete these projects. However, this requires careful consideration of resource allocation, careful scheduling choices, and exact sequencing to maximize efficiency while managing the complex interactions between task dependencies. A novel discrete-event heuristic is presented to solve this project scheduling problem, which is later extended into a probabilistic algorithm using biased-randomization techniques. In addition, an adaptive mechanism was introduced to tune the parameters of the algorithm for optimal scheduling in different problem instances. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, finding high-quality solutions for difficult problem sets in short computational times. This intuitive and efficient approach can empower company managers to efficiently improve operational efficiency, reduce project costs, and ultimately increase their business’s success.