The impact of various activity assumptions on the lead time and resource utilization of resource-constrained projects

The well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) schedules project activities within the precedence and renewable resource constraints while minimizing the total lead time of the project. The basic problem description assumes non-pre-emptive activities with fixed durations, and has been extended to various other assumptions in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the effect of three activity assumptions on the total lead time and the total resource utilization of a project. More precisely, we investigate the influence of variable activity durations under a fixed work content, the possibility of allowing activity pre-emption and the use of fast tracking to decrease a project’s duration. We give an overview of the procedures developed in the literature and present some modifications to an existing solution approach to cope with our activity assumptions under study. We present computational results on a generated dataset and evaluate the impact of all assumptions on the quality of the schedule.