The Electromagnetism Meta-heuristic Applied to the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

摘要

Recently, an electromagnetism (EM) heuristic has been introduced by Birbil and Fang (2003) to solve unconstrained optimization problems. In this paper, we extend the EM methodology to combinatorial optimization problems and illustrate its effectiveness on the well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). We present computational experiments on a standard benchmark dataset, compare the results of the different modifications on the original EM framework with current state-of-the-art heuristics, and show that the procedure is capable of producing consistently good results for challenging instances of the problem under study. We also give directions for future research in order to further explore the potential of this new technique.