A Study On The Optimization Of Resource Constrained Project Portfolio Selection And Scheduling

With the ecomomic globalization and the increasing fierceness of the market competation, project portfolio selection and project scheduling have gradually become popular topics both practically and theoretically. In practice, most organizations hope to develop various projects simultaneity. Facing limited resources and numerous project candidates, especially the R&D projects with high investment and high risk, the managers urgently need an effective method to find the optimal project portfolio, and make a suitable plan for project scheduling and resource allocation. In study, more and more scholars have donated themselves in the field of project selection and project scheduling. Most of them, however, focused either on project selection or on project scheduling, separately, ignoring the interaction between these two project management problems.In this research, an integral model for resource constrained project portfolio selection and scheduling is developed, which treats multi-projects scheduling as a sub-problem of project selection and seeks to maximize the profit of project portfolio. To soluting this NP-hard problem, two (alternative) optimizational algorithms are designed, which are based on the ant colony optimization and multi-agent system respectively. Both of them are composed of (1) a heuristic for the project scheduling; (2) a metaheuristic for the project selection. Solving a series of instances, which are generated from Patterson 110 problems and PSPLIB, the two algorithms' parameters are analyzed and their effectiveness and efficiency are tested.