Development of a Set of Algorithms for the Multi-Project Scheduling Problems

In this paper, the problem of determining the best schedule for a set of projects has been modeled in the form of a generalized tardiness flowshop (GTF) problem. We develop a set of heuristic algorithms for minimizing the total tardiness of jobs in a GTF problem. In the generalized version of tardiness flowshop problems, a job is considered to be a collection of operations and there is a due date associated with the completion of each operation on each machine. Four algorithms based on the concept of “apparent tardiness cost” (ATC) are developed for solving the GTF problem. The relative effectiveness of the developed algorithms will then be evaluated through an extensive computational experiment.