Robust Project Scheduling with Unreliable Resources: A Variable Neighbourhood Search Based Heuristic Approach

Approaches for proactive project scheduling under limited resource condition has been widely researched by many researchers. In real world situations, the parameters of projects are vulnerable to uncertainty, change or disruption, which necessitates that the initial baseline schedule must be revised. With this in mind, in order to protect an existing schedule from any possible future disruptions as a result of single and/or multiple resource breakdowns and to make that schedule robust, we have proposed a semantic approach to effectively design proactive schedules. To solve that proactive schedule, a variable neighbourhood search-based heuristic (VNSH) is proposed, which can generate robust schedules after absorbing all possible resource uncertainties. Benchmark instances from the Project Scheduling Library (PSLIB) for 30 and 120 activities are considered to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach.