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A hybrid scatter search/electromagnetism meta heuristic for project scheduling
Debels, Dieter De Reyck, B. Leus, Roel Vanhoucke, Mario
Debels, Dieter
De Reyck, B.
Leus, Roel
Vanhoucke, Mario
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Working paper
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Supervisor
Publication Year
2003
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Book
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
25
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Publication End page
Publication NUmber of pages
30
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Abstract
In the last few decades, several effective algorithms for solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem have been proposed. However, the challenging nature of this problem, summarised in its strongly NP-hard status, restricts the effectiveness of exact optimisation to relatively small instances. In this paper, we present a new meta-heuristic for this problem, able to provide near-optimal heuristic solutions. The procedure combines elements from scatter search, a generic population-based evolutionary search method, and a recently introduced heuristic method for the optimisation of unconstrained continuous functions based on an analogy with electromagnetism theory, hereafter referred to as the electromagnetism meta-heuristic. We present computational experiments on standard benchmark datasets, compare the results with current state-of-the-art heuristics, and show that the procedure is capable of producing consistently good results for challenging instances of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. We also demonstrate that the algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art existing heuristics. Keywords: project scheduling, heuristics, scatter search, electromagnetism
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Programme & Portfolio Management