Abstract
Scheduling projects is a difficult and time consuming process, and has far-reaching implications for any organization’s operations. By generalizing various aspects of project scheduling, decision makers are enabled to capture reality and act accordingly. In the context of the MISTA 2013 conference, the first MISTA challenge, organized by the authors, introduced such a general problem model: the Multi-Mode Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Scheduling Problem (MRCMPSP). The present paper reports on the competition and provides a discussion on its results. Furthermore, it provides an analysis of the submitted algorithms, and a study of their common elements. By making all benchmark datasets and results publicly available, further research on the MRCMPSP is stimulated.
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Notes
Values for the critical path duration of the projects are provided in the input file.
Intel Core i7-2600 at 3.4 Ghz and 8 GB RAM with hyper-threading, turbo boost and energy saver disabled. ITC2011 benchmark tool score: 619 s.
The time limit was checked by measuring the wall clock time of the algorithms. The algorithm should stop autonomously within the time limit. Small deviations of less than 0.1 s were allowed.
Details on how all these ranks were calculated can be reviewed in the detailed Google Docs Sheet, containing all results, at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ar3CEQ-QxKb6dHZqbG9xNC0tUlN5UV95aGRsZFYyZHc&usp=sharing.
PSPLIB benchmark website: http://www.om-db.wi.tum.de/psplib/main.html.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the challenge sponsors: iMinds, CONUNDRA and OM Partners. We would also like to thank all participating teams. This research is partially supported by a Ph. D. Grant of the agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT).
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Appendix 1: File formats
Appendix 1: File formats
1.1 Instance input file format
All problem inputs are integer valued, and comply with the following file format. Each problem instance is defined by \(n+1\) files, one global file and \(n\) project files.
1.2 Global file
The global file contains the number of projects, the release dates, the path to the project files, and the global resource capacities. Values are space separated and should respect the following order:
1.3 Project files
Each project is defined in a separate file. The relative path to this file is given in the global file (e.g. j20.mm/j2010_1.mm). A project file contains the number of activities (including the dummy activities), the precedence relations between the activities, the execution modes, and the local resource capacities. The individual projects are represented in the PSPLIBFootnote 5 MRCPSP file format.
Important note: In order to preserve compatibility with PSPLIB, the global resources always overwrite the local resources and their capacities. For example, consider the following global resource capacities (16,\(-\)1,\(-\)1,\(-\)1) and local resource capacities (RR1 = 14, RR2 = 18, NR1 = 60, NR2 = 68), then there exists one global renewable resource with capacity 16, one local renewable resource with capacity 18 and two non-renewable resources with capacities 60 and 68. The local renewable resource with capacity 14 can be ignored.
1.4 Solution output format
A solution for the MRCMPSP is defined as follows:
For each activity \(j\) of project \(i\),
-
the selected mode \(m_{ij}\),
-
and the start time \(s_{ij}\),
must be given.
An example is given in Table 7.
1.5 Solution validator
The validator checks feasibility of a solution, and computes the total objective cost. It is available for download at the MISTA challenge website (Wauters et al. 2013). The validator requires Java. It can be run as follows:
The validator was used for evaluating the quality of solutions produced by the algorithms submitted to the MISTA 2013 challenge. Note that the validator does not report validity of the instances.
1.6 Example
An example MRCMPSP instance and a corresponding feasible solution can be found on the challenge website. The instance has 2 projects, 10 jobs per project and 1 global renewable resource with capacity 12. The global file corresponding to this example is
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Wauters, T., Kinable, J., Smet, P. et al. The Multi-Mode Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Scheduling Problem. J Sched 19, 271–283 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-014-0402-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-014-0402-0