Towards the standardization of performance measures for project scheduling heuristics

Performance measures that can be used to compare project-scheduling heuristics are presented. Quantitative measures relative to the project duration are proposed for the diagnostic analysis of activity-sequencing heuristics in PERT networks with precedence and resource constraints. The aim is to establish a basis for the standardization of performance measures for the heuristics. A project analyst can use the evaluation techniques presented in deciding which of the many available scheduling heuristics is most appropriate for a given project scenario. A comparative experiment indicates that heuristics perform almost equally well for small projects, while their performances vary considerably for large projects. Thus, small projects with mediocre complexity are not accurate performance-measurement agents for scheduling heuristics