An artificial bee colony algorithm for resource-constrained project scheduling problem with spatial resources

This paper considers the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem with spatial resources (sRCPSP) which has complex scheduling features, such as divisibility, adjacency, group characteristics and exclusivity. Compared with typical Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP), sRCPSP needs to answer not only the question of "When to schedule?" but also of "Where to schedule?". To solve sRCPSP, a mathematical model subjected to both spatial resource and common renewable resource constraints was established. Then, an Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm based meta-heuristic which took Priority List as its representation scheme and Activity Type Priority based serial scheduling algorithm for sRCPSP as decoding method was proposed. Numerical experiments results show that the algorithm is feasible, effective and robust, and it has outperformed the existing procedures.