Optimizing Discounted Cash Flows in Project Scheduling - An Ant Colony Optimization Approach

Abstract--The multimode resource-constrained projectscheduling problem with discounted cash flows (MRCPSPDCF) is important and challenging for project management. As the problem is strongly nondeterministic polynomial-time hard, only a few algorithms exist and the performance is still not satisfying. To design an effective algorithm for the MRCPSPDCF, this paper proposes an ant colony optimization (ACO) approach. ACO is promising for the MRCPSPDCF due to the following three reasons. First, MRCPSPDCF can be formulated as a graph-based search problem, which ACO has been found to be good at solving. Second, the mechanism of ACO enables the use of domain-based heuristics to accelerate the search. Furthermore, ACO has found good results for the classical single-mode scheduling problems. But the utility of ACO for the much more difficult MRCPSPDCF is still unexplored. In this paper, we first convert the precedence network of the MRCPSPDCF into a mode-on-node (MoN) graph, which becomes the co...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TSMC
• Authors: Wei-neng Chen, Jun Zhang, Henry Shu-Hung Chung, Rui-zhang Huang, Ou Liu
• Keywords: ACO Algorithm, Algorithm, Artificial Intelligence, Domain-based Heuristics, TSMC 2010