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A Hybrid Scatter Search/Electromagnetism Meta-Heuristic For Project Scheduling, Dieter Debels, Bert De Reyck, Roel Leus, Mario Vanhoucke

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the last few decades, several effective algorithms for solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem have been proposed. However, the challenging nature of this problem, summarised in its strongly NP-hard status, restricts the effectiveness of exact optimisation to relatively small instances. In this paper, we present a new meta-heuristic for this problem, able to provide near-optimal heuristic solutions for relatively large instances. The procedure combines elements from scatter search, a generic population-based evolutionary search method, and from a recently introduced heuristic method for the optimisation of unconstrained continuous functions based on an analogy with electromagnetism theory. We present computational …