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A Bi-population Based Genetic Algorithm for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

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Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2005 (ICCSA 2005)

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Abstract

The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCP- SP) is one of the most challenging problems in project scheduling. During the last couple of years many heuristic procedures have been developed for this problem, but still these procedures often fail in finding near-optimal solutions for more challenging problem instances. In this paper, we present a new genetic algorithm (GA) that, in contrast of a conventional GA, makes use of two separate populations. This bi-population genetic algorithm (BPGA) operates on both a population of left-justified schedules and a population of right-justified schedules in order to fully exploit the features of the iterative forward/backward scheduling technique. Comparative computational results reveal that this procedure can be considered as today’s best performing RCPSP heuristic.

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Debels, D., Vanhoucke, M. (2005). A Bi-population Based Genetic Algorithm for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2005. ICCSA 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3483. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11424925_41

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11424925_41

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25863-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32309-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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