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Exact and Heuristic Methods for the Resource-Constrained Net Present Value Problem

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Handbook on Project Management and Scheduling Vol.1

Part of the book series: International Handbooks on Information Systems ((INFOSYS))

Abstract

An important variant of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem is to maximise the net present value. Significant progress has been made recently on this problem for both exact and inexact methods. The lazy clause generation based constraint programming approach is the state of the art among the exact methods and is briefly discussed. The performance of the Lagrangian relaxation based decomposition method is greatly improved when the forward-backward improvement heuristic is employed. A novel decomposition approach is designed for very large industrial problems which can make full use of the parallel computing capability of modern personal computers. Computational results are also presented to compare different approaches on both difficult benchmark problems and large industrial applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that much of the work on PSPDC and RCPSPDC considers discounted cash flows at the end of activities, and find solutions to end time variables, here we use start times. If the cash flows occur at the completion time instead of the start time, c i F has to be replaced by \(c_{i}^{F}e^{\alpha p_{i}}\).

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Acknowledgements

NICTA is funded by the Australian Government as represented by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

    Hanyu Gu

  2. National ICT Australia & Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Andreas Schutt, Peter J. Stuckey & Geoffrey Chu

  3. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield, Australia

    Mark G. Wallace

Authors
  1. Hanyu Gu
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  2. Andreas Schutt
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  3. Peter J. Stuckey
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  4. Mark G. Wallace
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  5. Geoffrey Chu
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Correspondence to Hanyu Gu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Management and Economics, Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Christoph Schwindt

  2. Institute of Management and Economics, Clausthal University of Technology, Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany

    Jürgen Zimmermann

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Gu, H., Schutt, A., Stuckey, P.J., Wallace, M.G., Chu, G. (2015). Exact and Heuristic Methods for the Resource-Constrained Net Present Value Problem. In: Schwindt, C., Zimmermann, J. (eds) Handbook on Project Management and Scheduling Vol.1. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05443-8_14

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