An instance generator for project scheduling problems with multi-skilled personnel constraints

As the knowledge-based economy society comes, knowledge workers, which has replaced capital, facilities, raw material and other kinds of traditional resource, is becoming the most important resource in economic activity. Project scheduling problems with multi-skilled personnel constraints (PSPMSPC) has come to one of the research hotspots in project management field. Researchers have proposed a wide variety of models and algorithms, but there are not benchmark instances for testing these models and algorithms, which leads to the hardship in the performance comparison of different models and algorithms. Making use of the typical resource-constrained project scheduling problems (RCPSP) as basic instances, combining with the feature of multi-skilled personnel resource, this paper presents several parameters concern about the solving difficulty, and proposes an instance generator for the PSPMSPC. The proposed generator can generate instances with high randomicity under different problem scales and parameter sets, which has a high level of theoretical and practical value.