Adaptive search for solving hard project scheduling problems

In this article we propose a new heuristic solution technique for resource-constrained project scheduling problems. Basically, it is a hybrid of priority rule and random search techniques which employs two types of adaptations in order to determine the solution space. We enhance this general scheme by the use of a new priority rule and by lower bounding techniques. The method is evaluated by comparing it with other recently proposed heuristics on a widely used set of benchmark-instances. Furthermore, we show that the procedure can be usefully applied to solve different hard problems within the field of project scheduling.