Empirical Study of Multi-objective Ant Colony Optimization to Software Project Scheduling Problems
Jing Xiao, Mei-Ling Gao, Huang Min-mei · 2015
The Software Project Scheduling Problem (SPSP) focuses on the management of software engineers and tasks in a software project so as to complete the tasks with a minimal cost and duration. It's becoming more and more important and challenging with the rapid development of software industry. In this paper, we employ a Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm using Decomposition and Ant Colony (MOEA/D-ACO) to solve the SPSP. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first application of Multi-objective Ant Colony Optimization (MOACO) to SPSP. Two heuristics capable of guiding the algorithm to search better in the SPSP model are examined. Experiments are conducted on a set of 36 publicly available instances. The results are compared with the implementation of another multi-objective evolutionary algorithm called NSGA-II for SPSP. MOEA/D-ACO does not outperform NSGA-II for most of complex instances in terms of Pareto Front. But MOEA/D-ACO can obtain solutions with much less time for all instances in our experiments and it outperforms NSGA-II with less duration for most of test instances. The performance may be improved with tuning of the algorithm such as incorporating more heuristic information or using other MOACO algorithms, which deserve further investigation.