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Introduction In general, project management involves planning and organizing a set of activities in order to generate a product or offer a service in the best possible way. A project duration can often be reduced by accelerating some of its activities by employing additional resources that increase the cost of the entire project. In this case, each activity can be performed by using a set of alternatives modes which are defined by a time-cost pair. Usually, only a reduced number of modes are taken into account for each activity. A key problem consists in finding a schedule that assigns modes to activities, providing a good tradeoff between the duration and cost of each activity, enabling the best project performance. This website describes the Deadline Problem in Project Management (DPPM), which accounts for both precedence between activities and deadline for its execution. In the related literature, it is also known as the Discrete Time/Cost Trade-off Problem (DTCTP). |
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An efficient evolutionary algorithm for the DPPM Traditional scheduling problems are NP-hard, thus classic exact methods are only useful for solving problem instances of reduced size. Heuristics and metaheuristics are promising methods for solving scheduling problems, since they are able to get efficient solutions in reasonable time, even for large problem instances. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have emerged as flexible and robust metaheuristic methods for solving this kind of complex problems, achieving the high level of accuracy and efficiency also shown in many other application areas. This website presents an efficient EA to solve the DPPM, implemented to compute results for realistic instances in reasonable execution times. The proposed EA was able to efficiently compute accurate results, which outperform previous results in literature, for a set of problem instances with tight deadline constraints. Overall, ten new best solutions for the set of 36 problem instances tackled were found using the propsed EA. |
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DPPM |
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Deadline Problem in Project Management |
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