A Novel Approach to DSM-Based Activity Sequencing Problem

Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying the design structure matrix (DSM) for planning projects that consist of many interrelated activities. One important objective of planning is to find an activity sequence so as to minimize the sum of superdiagonal numbers in a DSM. It is known that the problem is NP-complete and is difficult to solve. In this study, we prove several structural properties of the problem, and propose a heuristic for obtaining good feasible solutions. We find that based on the fold operation, a block of activities can be treated as a single activity. A novel hybrid algorithm is then presented for solving large activity sequencing problems. Finally, we perform a number of experiments and show that good solutions can be easily obtained by our approach. Moreover, the improvement achieved by the proposed approach is significant.