An Ant Colony System for Solving Resource Leveling Problem

To solve the resource constrained resource leveling problem(RLP), an algorithm based on ant colony system was developed. According to the characteristics of RLP and ant colony system, the solution construct diagram based permutation encoding was designed. The serial schedule generation scheme for RLP was developed to generate project plan from the permutation encoding. The ant colony system was employed to find the permutation encoding to generate the optimal project plan by serial generation schedule. The algorithm was coded in Java language, and a full factorial computational experiment was set up using the well-known standard instances in PSPLIB, the results reveal that the algorithm is effective for the RLP.