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Constraint Programming Applied to the Multi-Skill Project Scheduling Problem

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Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10416))

Abstract

The Multi-Skill Project Scheduling Problem is a variant of the well-studied Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem, in which the resources are assumed to be multi-skilled. Practical applications of this problem occur when the resources considered are a multi-skilled workforce or multi-purpose machines. This variant introduces a set of assignment decisions between the resources and activities, further to the usual scheduling decisions. This additional layer of complexity results in the problem becoming far more difficult to solve. We investigate different constraint programming models and searches tailored for solvers with nogood learning. These models and searches are then evaluated on instances available from the literature as well as newly generated ones. Using the best performing model and search, we are able to close at least 87 open instances from the literature.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development grant 15-4016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Kenneth D. Young & Andreas Schutt

  2. Decision Sciences, Data61, CSIRO, Melbourne, Australia

    Thibaut Feydy & Andreas Schutt

Authors
  1. Kenneth D. Young
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  2. Thibaut Feydy
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  3. Andreas Schutt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Schutt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    J. Christopher Beck

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Young, K.D., Feydy, T., Schutt, A. (2017). Constraint Programming Applied to the Multi-Skill Project Scheduling Problem. In: Beck, J. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66158-2_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66158-2_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66157-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66158-2

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