Manuskripte Aus Den Instituten F Ur Betriebswirtschaftslehre Der Universit at Kiel Solving Multi-mode Resource-constrained Project Scheduling Problems by a Simple, General and Powerful Sequencing Algorithm. Part I: Theory

In this paper we present an exact solution procedure of the branch-and-bound type for solving the muti-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem. The simplicity of the enumeration scheme enables a compact representation of the current state of the search process. This representation can be employed to formulate and prove search tree reduction schemes which highly increase the performance of the algorithm. Among the bene ts of the approach are ease of description, ease of implementation, ease of generalization, and, additionally, superior performance of the exact approach as well as reasonable heuristic capabilities of the truncated method. The procedure has been coded in C and implemented on a personal computer as well as on a workstation. In the second part of the paper we present the results of our experimental investigations. The experimental results obtained by using the standard project generator ProGen demonstrate a superior performance of the exact and heuristic approach. The size of the instances that can be solved to optimality has been nearly doubled.