Cost-efficient project management based on critical chain method with partial availability of resources

Cost-efficient project management based on Critical Chain Method (CCPM) is investigated in this paper. This is a variant of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) when resources are only partially available and a deadline is given, but the cost of the project should be minimized. RCPSP is a well- known NP hard problem but originally it does not take into consideration the initial resource workload. A metaheuristic algorithm driven by a metric of a gain was adapted to solve the problem when applied to CCPM. Refinement methods enhancing the quality of the results are developed. The improvement expands the search space by inserting the task in place of an already allocated task, if a better allocation can be found for it. The increase of computation time is reduced by distributed calculations. The computational experiments showed significant efficiency of the approach, in comparison with the greedy methods and with genetic algorithm, as well as high reduction of time needed to obtain the results.