A Work-content Based Resource Availability Cost Problem: Mathematical Modeling and Solving Procedure
SIAMAKMANESH NIMA, NAJAFI AMIR ABBAS, AZIMI FATEMEH · ECONOMIC COMPUTATION AND ECONOMIC CYBERNETICS STUDIES AND RESEARCH · 2022
Resource availability cost problem (RACP) is a project scheduling problem in which the resource availability levels are decision variables and the goal is to minimize the project resource costs.To make the RACP more realistic, the concept of work-content may be incorporated into the problem in order to lead to a reduction of costs.In this paper, the mathematical model for the problem under study is first proposed and a self-adaptive genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to tackle the problem.The self-adaptive approach allows the GA to utilize both serial and parallel schedule generation schemes simultaneously.Moreover, a local search operator is designed to improve the performance of the GA and its crossover and mutation operators.Results of several numerical instances show that the proposed GA performs relatively well.In addition, it is shown that incorporating the concept of the work-content into the RACP leads to reduce the project costs.