Heuristic Procedures for Generating Stable Project Baseline Schedules

Solution robust project scheduling is a growing research field aiming at constructing proactive schedules to cope with multiple disruptions during project execution. When stochastic activity durations are considered, including time buffers between activities is a proven method to improve the stability of a baseline schedule. This paper introduces multiple algorithms to include time buffers in a given schedule while a predefined project due date remains respected. Multiple efficient heuristic and meta-heuristic procedures are proposed to allocate buffers throughout the schedule. An extensive simulation-based analysis of the performance of all algorithms is given. The impact of the activity duration variance structure on the performance is discussed in detail.