Scheduling Interrelated Activities Using Insertion-Based Heuristics

The issue of scheduling interrelated activities is important and of particular concern to design managers. One tool that helps us to solve this issue is the design structure matrix (DSM) which can explicitly represent the information dependencies among interrelated activities. Based on the DSM method, this study presents effective approaches for sequencing interrelated activities with the goal of minimizing total feedback length, which is a good approximation for reducing project completion time. First, we prove two new properties of the problem, and develop an insertion-based heuristic. Second, the proposed heuristic is further improved by combing it with simulated annealing and genetic algorithm. Computer experiments show that our approaches outperform existing heuristics, in that with similar settings, our approaches often produces better solutions.