chaotic vibrating particles system for resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Project scheduling in the resource-constrained situation is one of the key issues of project-oriented organizations. the aim of resource-constrained project scheduling problem (rcpsp) is to find a schedule with minimum makespan by considering precedence and resource constraints. rcpsp is a combinatorial optimization problem and belongs to the np-hard class of problems. the exact methods search the entire search space and are unable to solve a large-sized project network problem. thus, metaheuristics are used to solve this problem in a short computational time. due to the probabilistic nature of metaheuristics, it is a challenging problem to make a balance between exploitation and exploration phases. the literature review shows that embedding of chaos improves both the convergence speed and the local optima avoidance of metaheuristics. this paper presents a chaotic vibrating particles system (cvps) optimization algorithm for solving the rcpsp. vibrating particles system (vps) is a physics-inspired metaheuristic which mimics the free vibration of single-degree-of-freedom systems with viscous damping. the performance and applicability of the cvps are compared with the standard vps and five well-known algorithms on three benchmark instances of the rcpsps. experimental studies reveal that the proposed optimization method is a promising alternative to assist project managers in dealing with rcpsp.