Technical note: a single-pass heuristic for multi-mode single-resource constrained project scheduling

We consider the resource-constrained project scheduling problem where only a single renewable resource is available. Such projects occur frequently in practice: such as construction projects with labour as the single resource or software projects with limited number of programmers. Usually, the manpower needs of activities in the project are estimated in units such as work-hours or work-days. Activity durations may be shortened by scheduling more resource. The contribution of this paper is a new heuristic, whose objective is to minimise the makespan of the project while staying within the constraints of available resource. The new heuristic is compared with existing heuristics. Computational results are presented.