The R-PSO algorithm solving multi-skill resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Abstract

The Multi-Skill Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (MS-RCPSP) is a combinational optimization problem with many applications in science and practical areas. This problem aims to find out the feasible schedule for the completion of projects and workflows that is minimal duration or cost (or both of them - multi objectives). The researches show that MS-RCPSP is classified into NP-Hard classification, which could not get the optimal solution in polynomial time. Therefore, we usually use approximate methods to carry out the feasible schedule. There are many publication results for that problem based on evolutionary methods such as GA, Greedy, Ant, etc. However, the evolutionary algorithms usually have a limitation that is fallen into local extremes after a number of generations. This paper will study a new method to solve the MS-RCPSP problem based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm that is called R-PSO. The new improvement of R-PSO is re-assigning the resource to execute solution tasks. To evaluate the new algorithm's effectiveness, the paper conducts experiments on iMOPSE datasets. Experimental results on simulated data show that the proposed algorithm finds a better schedule than related works.