The Proactive Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with Resource Transfer Times

In this paper, we investigate the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with resource transfer times under uncertain environment, aiming to generate robust baseline schedules that will be as stable as possible during project execution. In this problem, resource transfer times are taken into account, and the objective function is solution robustness maximization. As the problem is proved to be NP-hard in the strong sense, we develop a tabu search algorithm to solve the problem. After linearizing the proposed model, we use a commercial mathematical programming solver as a benchmark to solve the problem. From the computational results, we find that the developed tabu search algorithm is effective and efficient in solving the defined problem, which offers a way to deal with the proactive scheduling problem with resource transfer times. Through a sensitivity analysis, we find that robustness increases with the extension of the project due date and the decrease of resource transfer times.