Evolving priority rules for resource constrained project scheduling problem with genetic programming

Abstract The main task of scheduling is the allocation of limited resources to activities over time periods to optimize one or several criteria. The scheduling algorithms are devised mainly by the experts in the appropriate fields and evaluated over synthetic benchmarks or real-life problem instances. Since many variants of the same scheduling problem may appear in practice, and there are many scheduling algorithms to choose from, the task of designing or selecting an appropriate scheduling algorithm is far from trivial. Recently, hyper-heuristic approaches have been proven useful in many scheduling domains, where machine learning is applied to develop a customized scheduling method. This paper is concerned with the resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) and the development of scheduling heuristics based on Genetic programming (GP). The results show that this approach is a viable option when there is a need for a customized scheduling method in a dynamic environment, allowing the automated development of a suitable scheduling heuristic.