Simulated annealing for multi-mode project scheduling
 

Hongqi Pan and Chung-Hsing Yeh

School of Business Systems, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
 

Abstract

Multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling is a complex NP-hard problem. Exact algorithms fail to handle such a problem as the project size increases. In this paper, a simulated annealing algorithm is developed with an effective solution code representation in order to always generate a feasible neighbourhood solution. In addition, such a solution coding can avoid excessive computational time while producing new schedules. A computational experiment is conducted to examine how various temperature settings will affect the scheduling result.

Keywords: Multi-mode project scheduling, Renewable resources, Resource-constraints, Simulated annealing, Metropolis criterion, Forward pass, Backward pass