An Effective Memetic Algorithm for Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

Abstract

The resource constraint project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is one of the complex combinatorial optimization problems. Several approaches have been proposed over the decades to solve RCPSPs optimally within reasonable computational times. In this paper, a genetic algorithm based memetic algorithm (MA) is proposed to solve RCPSP with makespan minimization as the objective. The proposed algorithm incorporates Nawaz, Enscore, and Ham (NEH) heuristic-based initialization with carefully designed crossover and local search techniques. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated by solving 1560 problem instances from the popular project scheduling library (PSPLIB) and the results for different datasets have been compared with selected state-of-the-art algorithms. The comparison demonstrates the satisfactory performance of the proposed approach. Extensive experiments reveal that the proposed algorithm is very simple to implement and highly effective when compared to state-of-the-art methods.