Overview and State of the Art

In this chapter we present a state-of-the-art in the area of multi-mode project scheduling problems. These problems are characterized by the fact that each activity of a project can be executed in one of several modes, representing a relation between the resource requirements of the activity and its duration. In the overview we present the models and solution approaches that have been proposed in the literature across the class of multi-mode project scheduling problems up to now. Firstly we deal with the basic multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problems with the objective to minimize the project duration. We present the mixed-integer linear programming formulations of the problem, describe the exact approaches, the existing methods for lower bounds calculation, as well as heuristic approaches to solve the problem. Secondly, we also discuss special cases and extensions of the basic problem. Finally, we analyze multi-mode problems with other objectives, distinguishing between financial and resource-based objectives.

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