Abstract
This article extends a recently developed model for project scheduling and staffing by addressing two practically important features, namely the possibility of interruptions between the execution periods of a project on the one hand, and decisions between different types of labor contracts on the other hand. A hybrid metaheuristic employs a decomposition of the problem into a project scheduling problem and a personnel planning problem. For the scheduling decision, a guided variable neighborhood descent search is applied, whereas for the personnel planning decision, a greedy staffing heuristic is used to obtain initial solutions. In a post-processing phase, information about the best greedily evaluated schedule triggers a re-evaluation of the staffing decision by means of an exact solver. To test the approach, we compare the outcome of the developed hybrid metaheuristic with the results obtained by applying only the exact solver to the considered optimization problem. The numerical tests show that the metaheuristic performs well for small to medium-sized test instances and offers good solutions for larger instances where the exact solver fails to return a feasible solution.
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Felberbauer, T., Doerner, K.F., Gutjahr, W.J. (2016). Hybrid Metaheuristics for Project Scheduling and Staffing, Considering Project Interruptions and Labor Contracts. In: Dawid, H., Doerner, K., Feichtinger, G., Kort, P., Seidl, A. (eds) Dynamic Perspectives on Managerial Decision Making. Dynamic Modeling and Econometrics in Economics and Finance, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39120-5_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39120-5_20
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