Project scheduling with limited resources using an efficient differential evolution algorithm

Extensive research has been devoted to resource constrained project scheduling problem (rcpsp). resources are renewable and there is a unique way to perform the activities. this work develops a population based evolutionary algorithm namely differential evolution (de) to schedule project activities to minimize makespan subject to precedence constraints and resources availability. the proposed de uses a priority value based representation to encode a project schedule and a serial generation scheme to obtain the schedule. the de algorithm is compared with some existing algorithms available in the literature on the basis of a computational experiment performed on patterson’s test bed. obtained results show that the performance of the proposed de is quite satisfactory.