A survey of hybrid metaheuristics for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Abstract The Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) is a general problem in scheduling that has a wide variety of applications in manufacturing, production planning, project management, and various other areas. The RCPSP has been studied since the 1960s and is an NP-hard problem. As being an NP-hard problem, solution methods are primarily heuristics. Over the last two decades, the increasing interest in operations research for metaheuristics has resulted in a general tendency of moving from pure metaheuristic methods for solving the RCPSP to hybrid methods that rely on different metaheuristic strategies. The purpose of this paper is to survey these hybrid approaches. For the primary hybrid metaheuristics that have been proposed to solve the RCPSP over the last two decades, a description of the basic principles of the hybrid metaheuristics is given, followed by a comparison of the results of the different hybrids on the well-known PSPLIB data instances. The distinguishing features of the best hybrids are also discussed.