Computers and Operations Research - Special issue: heuristic, genetic and tabu search
Resource-constrained project scheduling: a survey of recent developments
Computers and Operations Research
MACS-VRPTW: a multiple ant colony system for vehicle routing problems with time windows
New ideas in optimization
Ant Colony Optimization
A genetic algorithm approach to a general category projectscheduling problem
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews
Ant colony system: a cooperative learning approach to the traveling salesman problem
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
Ant colony optimization for resource-constrained project scheduling
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
A short convergence proof for a class of ant colony optimizationalgorithms
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
Ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
The hyper-cube framework for ant colony optimization
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
Ant colony optimization for routing and load-balancing: survey and new directions
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
Proceedings of the 13th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Solving software project scheduling problems with ant colony optimization
Computers and Operations Research
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The multimode resource-constrained projectscheduling problem with discounted cash flows (MRCPSPDCF) is important and challenging for project management. As the problem is strongly nondeterministic polynomial-time hard, only a few algorithms exist and the performance is still not satisfying. To design an effective algorithm for the MRCPSPDCF, this paper proposes an ant colony optimization (ACO) approach. ACO is promising for the MRCPSPDCF due to the following three reasons. First, MRCPSPDCF can be formulated as a graph-based search problem, which ACO has been found to be good at solving. Second, the mechanism of ACO enables the use of domain-based heuristics to accelerate the search. Furthermore, ACO has found good results for the classical single-mode scheduling problems. But the utility of ACO for the much more difficult MRCPSPDCF is still unexplored. In this paper, we first convert the precedence network of the MRCPSPDCF into a mode-on-node (MoN) graph, which becomes the construction graph for ACO. Eight domain-based heuristics are designed to consider the factors of time, cost, resources, and precedence relations. Among these heuristics, the hybrid heuristic that combines different factors together performs well. The proposed algorithm is compared with two different genetic algorithms (GAs), a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm, and a tabu search (TS) algorithm on 55 random instances with at least 13 and up to 98 activities. Experimental results show that the proposed ACO algorithm outperforms the GA, SA, and TS approaches on most cases.