A note on the selection of priority rules in softw

Authors: Philipp Baumann Norbert Trautmann

Publish Date: 2016/01/16

Volume: 28, Issue: 4, Pages: 694-702

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Abstract

Various software packages for project management include a procedure for resourceconstrained scheduling In several packages the user can influence this procedure by selecting a priority rule However the resourceallocation methods that are implemented in the procedures are proprietary information therefore the question of how the priorityrule selection impacts the performance of the procedures arises We experimentally evaluate the resourceallocation methods of eight recent software packages using the 600 instances of the PSPLIB J120 test set The results of our analysis indicate that applying the default rule tends to outperform a randomly selected rule whereas applying two randomly selected rules tends to outperform the default rule Applying a small set of more than two rules further improves the project durations considerably However a large number of rules must be applied to obtain the best possible project durations

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