Scheduling projects with limited number of preemptions

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2009.01.006 Byline: Francisco Ballestin (a), Vicente Valls (b), Sacramento Quintanilla (c) Abstract: A recent paper (Ballestin F, Valls V, Quintanilla S. Preemption in resource-constrained project scheduling. European Journal of Operational Research 2008;189:1136-152) revealed the potential benefits of allowing one interruption when scheduling activities in a resource-constrained project. This paper further investigates the effect of interruption on project length in more general cases. To achieve this, a new model that covers most practical applications of discrete activity preemption is proposed and a metaheuristic algorithm for the problem is developed. Computational experiments on the standard j120 and j30 sets generated using ProGen study the difference in makespan between allowing m interruptions per activity, m=0,1,2,... . In the second part of the paper the usefulness of preemption in the presence of due dates is analysed. Author Affiliation: (a) Dpto. de Estadistica e Investigacion Operativa, Facultad de Economicas y Empresariales, Universidad Publica de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (b) Dpto. de Estadistica e Investigacion Operativa, Facultad de Matematicas, Universitat de Valencia, Spain (c) Dpto. de Economia Financiera y Matematica, Facultad de Economicas y Empresariales, Universitat de Valencia, Spain Article Note: (footnote) [star] This research was partially supported by the Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia under Contract DPI2007-63100.