The multimode resource constrained multiproject scheduling problem: Alternative formulations

Tactical management of development pipelines is concerned with the allocation of resources and scheduling of tasks. Though these decisions have to be made in the presence of uncertainty, to make the problem solvable it is customary to use deterministic MILP formulations of the multi-mode RCMPSP that are reevaluated after important uncertainties are realized. In spite of the major simplifications attained by down- playing the stochastic nature of the problem, the curse of dimensionality limits the exact solution of the formulations to very small systems. The curse is mainly caused by 3 factors: the indexing of the task execution modes the indexing of time periods, and the discrete character of the resources. Three models that attempt to overcome these limitations are proposed and compared. Results show that despite the theoretical advantages of the strategies used, the alternative formulations are limited to problems in the same range of applicability of the conventional multi-mode formulation. © 2008 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2008

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