AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE METAHEURISTIC FOR THE MULTI-MODE RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED PROJECT SCHEDULING WITH PRE-OPTIMIZED REPERTOIRE ON THE HARDEST MMLIB+ SET

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the Sounds of Silence (SoS) harmony search metaheuristic for the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP) using a pre-optimized starting repertoire. The presented algorithm is based on the time oriented version of the SoS harmony search metaheuristic developed by Csébfalvi et al. [1] for the single-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). The multi-mode SoS version exploits the fact that using a state-of-the art solver a small mixed integer linear programming problem (MILP) or a large linear programming problem (LP) can be solved within reasonable time. In order to illustrate the viability of the preoptimized starting repertoire we present computational results for the hardest and largest MMLIB+ benchmark set developed by Van Peteghem and Vanhoucke [2]. The computational result reveals the fact, that the pre-optimized repertoire drastically increases the efficiency of the problem solvong process.