A Comparison of Heuristics for Scheduling Projects with Cash Flows and Resource Restrictions

The problem addressed in this paper is the scheduling of activities in a project to maximize net present value given cash inflows, outflows, and resource restrictions. Although optimization procedures exist for small problems of this type, they generally cannot solve large-scale problems and may not be widely available. Six heuristic scheduling rules are compared on 80 test problems. The test problems include large-scale engineering construction projects as well as 50 resource constrained problems from the literature.