A fast greedy heuristic for scheduling modular projects

This article describes a heuristic for scheduling so-called ‘modular’ projects. Exact solutions to this NP-hard problem can be obtained with existing branch-and-bound and dynamic-programming algorithms, but only for small to medium-size instances. The proposed heuristic, by contrast, can be used even for large instances, or when instances are particularly difficult because of their characteristics, such as a low network density. The proposed heuristic draws from existing results in the literature on sequential testing, which will be briefly reviewed. The performance of the heuristic is assessed over a dataset of 360 instances.

[1]  Martin L. Puterman,et al.  Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming , 1994 .

[2]  Ignacio E. Grossmann,et al.  Optimization Models for the Scheduling of Testing Tasks in New Product Development , 1996 .

[3]  Yael Grushka-Cockayne,et al.  A New Challenge in Project Scheduling: The Incorporation of Activity Failures , 2007 .

[4]  Xin Yao,et al.  Stochastic ranking for constrained evolutionary optimization , 2000, IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput..

[5]  Erik Demeulemeester,et al.  Local search methods for the discrete time/resource trade‐off problem in project networks , 1998 .

[6]  F. Brian Talbot,et al.  Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling with Time-Resource Tradeoffs: The Nonpreemptive Case , 1982 .

[7]  Tonguç Ünlüyurt,et al.  Sequential testing of complex systems: a review , 2004, Discret. Appl. Math..

[8]  Andreas Drexl,et al.  Scheduling of Project Networks by Job Assignment , 1991 .

[9]  Roel Leus,et al.  Project Scheduling with Modular Project Completion on a Bottleneck Resource , 2011 .

[10]  Mohammad Ranjbar,et al.  An exact method for scheduling of the alternative technologies in R&D projects , 2013, Comput. Oper. Res..

[11]  Yosi Ben-Dov.  Optimal Testing Procedures for Special Structures of Coherent Systems , 1981 .

[12]  Yosi Ben-Dov.  A branch and bound algorithm for minimizing the expected cost of testing coherent systems , 1981 .

[13]  Prabuddha De,et al.  The discrete time-cost tradeoff problem revisited , 1995 .

[14]  N. Hansen,et al.  Markov Chain Analysis of Cumulative Step-Size Adaptation on a Linear Constrained Problem , 2015, Evolutionary Computation.

[15]  Z W Birnbaum,et al.  ON THE IMPORTANCE OF DIFFERENT COMPONENTS IN A MULTICOMPONENT SYSTEM , 1968 .

[16]  Roel Leus,et al.  R&D project scheduling when activities may fail , 2007 .

[17]  Piotr Jedrzejowicz.  Minimizing the Average Cost of Testing Coherent Systems: Complexity and Approximate Algorithms , 1983, IEEE Transactions on Reliability.

[18]  K. Sarma,et al.  The Least Cost Testing Sequence Problem , 2004 .

[19]  Bert De Reyck,et al.  Project Planning with Alternative Technologies in Uncertain Environments , 2013, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[20]  Kim B. Clark,et al.  Design Rules: The Power of Modularity Volume 1 , 1999 .

[21]  Richard Butterworth.  Some Reliability Fault-Testing Models , 1972, Oper. Res..

[22]  Fabrice Talla Nobibon,et al.  Scheduling modular projects on a bottleneck resource , 2014, J. Sched..

[23]  Vipul Jain,et al.  Resource-Constrained Scheduling of Tests in New Product Development , 1999 .

[24]  Kim B. Clark,et al.  Design Rules: The Power of Modularity , 2000 .