A stochastic model for project selection and scheduling problem

Resource limitation in zero time may cause to some profitable projects not to be selected in project selection problem, thus simultaneous project portfolio selection and scheduling problem has received significant attention. In this study, budget, investment costs and earnings are considered to be stochastic. The objectives are maximizing net present values of selected projects and minimizing variance of them. Benefiting an efficient multi-objective approach to satisfy every conflicting objective, an integer non-linear goal programming model is developed. Another contribution of this paper is to consider cost dependency between the projects, in project portfolio selection and scheduling problem. Due to the complexity of this problem, especially in large sizes, imperialist competitive algorithm and genetic algorithm are presented. The effectiveness of the model and proposed algorithms are demonstrated via a case study in a knowledge based company at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. The result shows high performance of the both proposed algorithms.