Chaotic vibrating particles system for resource-constrained project scheduling problem

Project scheduling in the resource-constrained situation is one of the key issues of project-oriented organizations. The aim of resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is finding a schedule with minimum makespan by considering precedence and resource constraints. RCPSP is a combinatorial optimization problem and belongs to the class of NP-hard problems. The exact methods search the entire search space and are unable to solve large-sized project networks. Thus metaheuristics are used to solve this problem with less computational time. Due to the probabilistic nature of metaheuristics, it is a challenging problem to balance between exploitation and exploration phases. The literature review shows that embedding with chaos improves both the convergence speed and the local optima avoidance of metaheuristics. This paper presents a Chaotic Vibrating Particles System (CVPS) optimization algorithm for solving the RCPSP. Vibrating Particles System (VPS) is a physic inspired metaheuristic which mimics the free vibration of single degree of freedom systems with viscous damping. The performance and applicability of the CVPS is compared with the standard VPS, and five well known algorithms on three benchmark instances of the RCPSPs Experimental studies reveals that the proposed optimization method is a promising alternative to assist project managers in dealing with RCPSP.