Using Resource Scarceness Characteristics to Solve the Multi-Mode Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

In the past decades, resource parameters have been introduced in project scheduling literature to measure the scarceness of resources of a project instance. In this paper, we use these resource scarceness parameters to differentiate in the search process needed to solve the multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem, in which multiple execution modes are available for each activity in the project. Therefore, we propose a scatter search algorithm, which is executed with different improvement methods, each tailored to the specific characteristics of different renewable and nonrenewable resource scarceness values. Computational results prove the effectiveness of the improvement methods and reveal that the procedure is among the most competitive algorithms in the open literature.