An iterative backward/Forward Technique for the scheduling of resource-constrained projects within Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is one of the most-widely used software packages for project management. For the scheduling of resource-constrained projects, the package applies a priority-based procedure using a specific schedule-generation scheme. This procedure performs relatively poor when compared against other software packages or state-of-the-art methods for resource-constrained project scheduling. In this paper, we present a scheduling heuristic for Microsoft Project which generates some initial schedules by sampling various priority rules, and improves each of these schedules by iterative backward-forward passes. In order to account for all types of temporal or calendar constraints available in Microsoft Project, the heuristic employs only Microsoft Project's specific schedule-generation scheme. Computational results for a set of 1320 projects from the standard test set PSPLIB indicate that the presented heuristic renders the resource-allocation capabilities of Microsoft Project comparable to those of the best-performing software packages.