Heuristic Method for Satisfying Both Deadlines and Resource Constraints

Abstract

Project deadline and resource limits are practical constraints that coexist in most projects. While heuristic methods for constrained resource scheduling (CRS) have become mainstream in commercial scheduling software, no commercial software includes any time-cost trade-off (TCT) heuristic to help meet deadline, let alone any procedure to resolve both deadline and resource constraints. This paper, therefore, introduces a practical heuristic method to meet both deadline and resource limits. The proposed method basically uses cycles of crashing for lowest-cost critical activities (i.e., stepwise TCT process) and resolves any resource overallocation (i.e., CRS) within each TCT cycle. This intertwined approach is logical, fast, and provides a set of feasible project durations that do not violate resource limits. To facilitate its practical use, the proposed method has been programmed as an add-in tool to Microsoft Project software. The paper discusses several case studies that prove the practicality and usefulness of the proposed approach to both researchers and professionals and provides a comparison of results with other literature efforts.