AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE METAHEURISTIC FOR THE MULTI-MODE RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED PROJECT SCHEDULING WITH PRE-OPTIMIZED REPERTOIRE ON THE HARDEST MMLIB+ SET

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the Sounds of Silence (SoS) harmony search metaheuristic for the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP) using a pre-optimized starting repertoire. The presented algorithm is based on the time oriented version of the SoS harmony search metaheuristic developed by Csébfalvi et al. [1] for the single-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). The multi-mode SoS version exploits the fact that using a state-of-the art solver a small mixed integer linear programming problem (MILP) or a large linear programming problem (LP) can be solved within reasonable time. In order to illustrate the viability of the pre-optimized starting repertoire we present computational results for the hardest and largest MMLIB+ benchmark set developed by Van Peteghem and Vanhoucke [2]. The computational result reveals the fact, that the pre-optimized repertoire drastically increases the efficiency of the problem solvong process.