an efficient meta-heuristic algorithm for project scheduling with multiple modes

in this paper, a fully informed particle swarm (fips) algorithm is proposed for solving the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (mrcpsp) with minimization of project makespan as the objective subject to resource and precedence constraints. in the proposed fips, a random key and the related mode list (ml) representation scheme are used as encoding schemes and the multi-mode serial schedule generation scheme (mssgs) is considered as the decoding procedure. in particular, a new fitness function which reduces the average deviation from optimality and cpu-time is presented. comparing the results of the proposed fips with other approaches using the well-known benchmark sets in psplib validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to solve the mrcpsp.