Heuristic methods for minimizing resource availability costs in multi-mode project scheduling

In this paper, a multi-mode project scheduling problem with deadline constraints is considered to minimize the resource availability cost. Modes of each activity are associated with different durations and renewable resources. Three kinds of rules are developed for activity selection, mode assignment, and time decision, respectively. A lot of combinations of the three kind rules are compared and the choosing probabilities are determined, based on which a regret probability based stochastic (RPBS) method is proposed for the considered problem. Computational results demonstrate that the RPBS method outperforms the existing one and the rule combinations in effectiveness but with a little more computation time.