Minimizing the Total Tardiness of a Game Project Considering the Overlap Effect

There has long been a custom that game development is not the mainstream of engineering and its tardiness brings little or even no harm to this industry. Nowadays, the pendulum of industrial development has swung to another side. A game project may involve hundreds of developers, thousands of jobs, and millions of costs. Situations would be worse if jobs overlap with others. Any delay of a large game project can cause a heavy penalty. Consequently, in this study, we propose two scheduling algorithms to reduce the total tardiness of a game project. If the problem size is small, a branch-and-bound algorithm is employed to provide the optimal schedules; otherwise a genetic algorithm is used to generate near-optimal schedules. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms reduce the total tardiness significantly.