A memetic approach to project scheduling that maximizes the effectiveness of the human resources assigned to project activities

Abstract

In this paper, we address a project scheduling problem that considers a priority optimization objective for project managers. This objective involves assigning the most effective set of human resources to each project activity. To solve the problem, we propose a memetic algorithm. This is a hybrid algorithm that combines an evolutionary algorithm and a local search algorithm. To evaluate the performance of the memetic algorithm, we report the computational experiments carried out on six different instance sets. Then, we compare the performance of the memetic algorithm with that of the evolutionary algorithm previously proposed in literature for solving the addressed problem. The obtained results show that the memetic algorithm outperforms the previous evolutionary algorithm. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.