Casting Project Scheduling with Time Windows as a DTP

This paper extends existing work on constraint-based scheduling for solving complex Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems. The main result of the paper is the reduction of the RCPSP/max problem to a Disjunctive Temporal Problem that allow customization of specific properties within a backtracking search procedure for makespan optimization where decision variables are Minimal Critical Sets (MCSs). In particular an algorithm is proposed whose branching strategy is able to deduce new constraints which explicitly represent infeasible or useless search paths, such additional information allows early pruning of alternatives and strongly improves the efficiency of the overall search procedure. The paper includes an experimental evaluation on a set of standard, quite challenging, benchmark problem sg iving an empirical validation of the effectiveness of the proposed ideas.

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