An Improved Differential Evolution Solution for Software Project Scheduling Problem

Abstract

This paper proposes a differential evolution (DE) method for the software project scheduling problem (SPSP). The interest on finding a more efficient solution technique for SPSP is always a topic of interest due to the fact of ever growing challenges faced by the software industry. The curse of dimensionality is introduced in the scheduling problem by ever increasing software assignments and the number of staff who handles it. Thus the SPSP is a class of NP-hard problem, which requires a rigorous solution procedure which guarantees a reasonably better solution. Differential evolution is a direct search stochastic optimization technique that is fairly fast and reasonably robust. It is also capable of handling nondifferentiable, nonlinear, and multimodal objective functions like SPSP. This paper proposes a refined DE where a new mutation mechanism is introduced. The superiority of the proposed method is experimented and demonstrated by solving the SPSP on 50 random instances and the results are compared with some of the techniques in the literature.