A heuristic methodology for solving spatial aresource-constrained project scheduling problems

In this paper we present a heuristic methodology for solving resource-constrained project scheduling problems with renewable and spatial resources. We especially concentrate on spatial resources that are encountered in construction projects, but our analysis can easily be generalized to other sectors. Our methodology is based on the application of a schedule generation scheme on apriority list of activities. We explain why the parallel schedule generation scheme is not applicable for projects with spatial resources. We introduce a procedure for transforming priority lists into precedence and resource feasible lists that avoid deadlocks on the spatial resources. We conclude from a computational experiment on two sets of instances that priority rules performing well for the regular resource-constrained project scheduling problem also perform well in the presence of spatial resources and allow to effectively solve large problems in very short CPU time.