Combinative method using simulated annealing and tabu

search for solving resource leveling problem.

First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang

Department of Electronic Engineering, Southern Taiwan University

Tainan, TAIWAN
E-mail: M9435204@webmail.stut.edu.tw
Abstract. In this research I have introduced a new heuristic approach combing Tabu search (TS) with
Simulated annealing (SA) which is called TSSA to solve resource leveling problem. The problems used in
this research are the activity scheduling applications solved under resource limitations (resource upper
limit and the unit cost of the resource) and activity constraints (maximal time interval and minimal time
interval between each two activities). K. Neumann and J. Zimmermann (1999) proposed an algorithm in
which each activity is given an optimal start time by using a priority rule, and after that, the activity is
arranged into the schedule with that start time. However, the proposed algorithm of K. Neumann and J.
Zimmermann did not adjust the start times of activities that have already been arranged into the
schedule. Therefore, improvements have been made in this aspect in this research.

Keywords: resource leveling, Tabu search (TS), Simulated annealing (SA), maximal time interval,
minimal time interval.
1 Introduction
In recent years, increasing competition has
been seen among corporations with the
development of expanding globalization. As a
result, how to be more competitive in the global
market is an important issue to many enterprises.
For many manufacturers, the employment of
better production scheduling tools means a direct
and effective way to control cost expenditure. A
good production scheduling tool should take into
account a lot of production limitations, including
costs, resource loadings, etc.
In this research, a heuristic approach has been
proposed to control both the costs and resource
loadings according to given standards and
achieve resource leveling as well. The relations
between these three goals are discussed as
follows. First, when we consider about the
leveling of resource, it is of significant
importance that all the resource should be used in
an effective way, because in a sense, more
resources means more costs. Therefore, how to
use the resource most effectively so that best
production performance and highest profits can
be achieved is the No.1 item that should be taken
into consideration. In addition, attention should
be attached to avoid extra cost expenditure, for
example, the extra cost occurred when resource is
overloaded. Thus, the leveling of resource is
equivalent to the effective utilization of resource.
Second, resource has its own capacity, below
which the unit cost of production is fixed and
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.
above which the unit cost rises as the overloading
occurs, in which case the profit would be
impaired with the increased cost. To solve this
problem, importance has been attached to the
resource capacity in this research in order to
allocate jobs and make adjustments under the
circumstance that all resource should not be
overloaded and all jobs are not disturbed in their
sequence, which can consequently reduce the
extra cost from resource overloading.
Finally, as for the control of costs, efforts have
been made on finding such a time when the costs
are lowest and the resource value can be
maximized. Thus a time is set to be the starting
time of a job, so that even new jobs are added, the
resource costs will not significantly increase. If
attention is only paid to the leveling of resource,
resource capacity may be transgressed, or costs
may increase. Therefore, how to balance and
satisfy the above three goals simultaneously
become the core of this research. Since the
processing sequence of jobs must be taken into
account, maximum and maximum time lags are
set to different jobs in this research in order to
restrict the starting time of jobs.
In K. Neumann and J. Zimmermann (1999) the
authors study the problem of resources leveling in
project scheduling, where activities are subject to
minimum and maximum time lags and explicit
resource constraints, i.e., there is a maximum
resource availability for each resource type and
time period. The time horizon is fixed. The
authors propose priority rule heuristics for this
problem with a variety of different objective
functions. However, in the above literature,
attention has only been paid to the jobs to be
scheduled, and no adjustment is ever made to the
already scheduled jobs. But actually, after all the
activities have been allocated into the schedule,
improvements can still be made upon the
schedule. Therefore, in this research, the
algorithm proposed in the literature is used to
create the initial solutions. After that, Tabu search
and Simulated annealing are combined together
in TSSA to perform the search of optimal
solutions. It is known that the features of Tabu
search is that it will not perform search to the
same area, therefore, it is able to jump out of the
local minimum deadlock. Since in the Simulated
annealing algorithm, the same area will be
inevitably searched over and over again, Tabu
search is combined with Simulated annealing to
avoid such disadvantage, and the combined new
algorithm is applied to the problem of resource
leveling. More details about TSSA will be given
in 3.
The composition of this paper is: 2 gives an
introduction of the research background, 3
describes the research approach, 4 is the
simulation and result analysis of the experiment,
and finally 5 contains the conclusion and future
work.
2 Literature review
2.1 The overview of resource leveling
problem (RLP)
In Resource leveling for projects with
[1]
schedule-dependent time windows proposed an
approach using dependent adjustment time
windows between activities to allocate the
activities into the schedule. In their research, the
earliest start time and latest start time of an
activity are updated repeatedly, aiming at
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.
reducing the total float time over and over again.
Meanwhile, all activities are allocated into the
schedule at its optimal start time. My research is
carried out based on the above literature. First we
carry out the algorithm proposed in that literature
to be initial solution, then use the proposed TSSA
approach in this paper to improve the initial
solution. By using TSSA approach, successfully
improve the optimal start time of each activity.
2.2 Tabu search
In A tabu search approach for the flow shop
[2]
scheduling problem proposed the basic form of
Tabu search (TS) is founded on ideas proposed
by Glover in 1986. TS is a meta-heuristic that
guides a local heuristic search procedure to
explore the solution space beyond
optimality. Tabu search starts from an initial
solution and moves at each iteration from initial
solution to its best neighbor, until a stopping
criterion is satisfied. The most important is that
the cost of neighbor is not necessarily less than
initial cost. There are two main components of
TS. The first one is a search that uses an
operation called “move” to define
neighborhood of any given solution. Another
main component of TS is its use of “memory”,
which creates a more flexible search behavior
Memory-based strategies are therefore
hallmark of Tabu search approaches.
2.3 Simulated annealing
In A multi-objective production scheduling
case study solved by simulated annealing
proposed SA is a local search method that finds
its inspiration in the physical annealing process
studied in statistical mechanics. An SA algorithm
repeats an iterative neighbor generations
procedure and follows search directions that
improve the objective function value. While
exploring solution space, the SA method offers
the possibility to accept worse neighbor solutions
in a controlled manner in order to escape from
local minima. More precisely, in each iteration,
for a current solution x characterized by an
objective function value f ( x ) , a neighbor x  is
selected from the neighborhood of
x denoted N ( x ) , and defined as the set of all its
immediate neighbors. For each move, the
objective difference   f ( x )  f ( x ) is
evaluated. For minimizationx problems
replaces x whenever   0 . Otherwise, x
could also be accepted with a probability
P  e (  ) / T . The acceptance probability is
local compared to a number yrandom  [0,1] generated
randomly and x is accepted whenever
P  yrandom .The factors that influence acceptance
probability are the degree of objective function
value degradation  (smaller degradations
induce greater acceptance probabilities) and the
parameter T called temperature (higher values of
T give higher acceptance probability). The
the temperature can be controlled by a cooling
scheme specifying how it should be progressively
reduced to make the procedure more selective as
the search progresses to neighborhoods of good
the solutions. There exist theoretical schedules
guaranteeing asymptotic convergence toward the
optimal solution. They require however infinite
computing time. In practice, much simpler and
finite computing time schedules are preferred
even if they do not guarantee an optimal solution.
[3]
A typical finite time implementation of SA
consists in decreasing the temperature T in S
steps, starting from an initial value and using
attenuation factor  (0    1) . The initial
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.
temperature T0 is supposed to be high enough to
allow acceptance of any new neighbor proposed
in the first step. In each step s, the procedure
generates a fixed number of neighbor solutions
N sol and evaluates them using the current
temperature value Ts   T0 . The whole process
s max
is commonly called ‘‘cooling chain’’ or also
‘‘markov chain’’. Adaptation of SA to an
optimization problem consists in defining its
specific components: a solution representation of
the problem, a method for the objective function
value calculation, a neighbor generation
mechanism for solution space exploration and a
cooling scheme including stopping criteria.
3 Building the TSSA for arranging the
RLP
3.1 Problem definition
This research is carried out for activities
scheduling. First, we assume that there are N
activities to be scheduled, then activities network
is introduced to describe the relations between
activities. The activities are indexed from 0 to
n  1 , representing the start time as well as the
completion time of the schedule, respectively.
The processing time of each activity is greater
than zero Pj  0 , and S j  0 , and the start time
of the whole schedule is zero S0  0 , which
means the schedule is started at time 0. Sn 1
defines the schedule duration or makespan. It is
assumed that there’s a fixed given length d ,
thus the constraint Sn 1  d can be obtained.
Now we allocate n+2 nodes ranging from 0 to
n+1 into the activities network. It is assumed that
a fixed distance d
min
ij
is set between each two
activities, meaning the start time i of one
activity and the start time j of another activity
should be keep d
min
ij
away from each other, i.e.
S j  Si  d min
ij
. On the other hand, d ij
max
defines
the maximum distance of the start times of two
activities, meaning the start times of two
activities cannot exceed d ij , i.e. S j  Si  d ijmax .
In this research, the distance of the start times of
activities are defined by d ijmin and d ijmax ,
positive numbers representing minimum time
lags while negative numbers representing
maximum time lags. All the activities within the
activities network must be restricted by these
restrictions. Therefore, the start times are very
important to the whole scheduling, since all the
activities must be restricted by these rules in
order to be allocated into the schedule. Under
such scheduling rule, it is likely that loadings
would become uneven and the cost would
increase accordingly. Another case is that some
activities cannot be allocated into the schedule
within a limited period of time. In Resource
leveling for projects with schedule-dependent
time windows[1], careful consideration has been
made upon the allocation of activities, but it only
focused on the unscheduled activities and
calculated when would be the optimal start times
of those unscheduled activities. No efforts have
been made on the already scheduled activities.
Therefore, in this research, an optimization
procedure is proposed to make adjustments after
all activities are scheduled. All these adjustments
are made according to the restrictions of
d ijmin and d ijmax . More details will be provided in
the following. This research employs a single
resource where K is used to represent the
resource. Let us first suppose that the capacity of
available resource Rk  0 , and if activity j is
allocated to resource K , it will cost a capacity of
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.
rjk  0 , satisfying 0  rjk  Rk . In other words,
rjk is supposed to be a constant satisfying the
above restriction. Now we want to create a
schedule S , whose t  0,1,..., d  1 . All activities
should be allocated into 0  t  d . Resource
profile is used to represent the loading per unit
time within the production period. Three
objective functions in the following are used to
calculate the loading per unit time of the resource
profile. The results got will be considered the
evidence of determining the start time of an
activity. The general resource leveling problem
can then be formulated as follows:
min f ( R )
subject to S j  Si  d ij (1)
S0  0 (2)
Sn  1  d (3)
3.2 Different classes of objective functions
Here is some brief introduction about the
three objective functions used in this research. All
the three functions must be minimized in order to
get a well-balanced resource profile.
The first objective function relates to the
usage of resource per unit time. In (4), Ck  0
represents the unit cost of resource K, the goal of
this function is to minimize the sum of the
maximum resource costs per period. This
function reflects the resource investment
problem.
k
f ( R )   Ck max rks (t ) (4)
k 1 t  0,1,... d 1
The second objective function is used to
calculation the error, which refers to the deviation
between the initially given capacity of the
resource lk  0 and the actual loading per unit
time of the resource. lk can also be called the
average loading of resource or the capacity of
resource. Objective value can be positive or
negative. When Objective value is negative, it
means that no overload occurs during this unit
time. Therefore, in this research, attention is
mainly paid to the unit time t where Objective
value is positive. The value of function is the
smaller the better, which means the control of
resource K is well performed.
k d 1
f ( R )   Ck  [rks (t )  lk ] (5)
k 1 t 0
The third objective function aims at
minimizing the difference between resource
usage at day t and resource usage at day t-1. In
real life, the leveling of resource is extremely
important, therefore the value of this function
should also be the less the smaller the better. If
this function value is smaller, it means resource K
is well utilized for every unit time.
k d
f ( R )   Ck  [ rks (t )  rks (t  1)] (6)
k 1 t 0
The above functions have been extensively
discussed in many literatures and are proved to be
effective. Accordingly, the three functions are
introduced in this research, too, to evaluate the
schedules. In addition, the evaluation performed
by this research does not depend only on a single
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.

objective function, but get the objective value of
the three functions; hence three objective
functions are combined to form one objective
function by the weights, in order to obtain a
well-balanced schedule. The weights are given by
problem definitions. However there are many
objective functions in production scheduling, how
to select the objective functions depend on
different problem definitions.
work of its neighboring activities (predecessor
activities and successor activities). Its target is to
obtain a smaller TFj , and make the activities into
critical activities, so that the activities can be
allocated into the schedule immediately. When
more and more activities are allocated into the
schedule, the TFj of the unscheduled activities
become smaller and smaller. Such approach can
be presented by:

3.3 Time interval of activity ES j  max ( d 0 j , max ( Si  d ij )) (8)

LS j  min( d  d j , n 1 , min( Si  d ji )) (9)

More details are to be discussed about activity.
First, it should be noted that each activity
3.4 Priority rules
contains many elements, for example, processing
time, quantity, start time and completion time. In the algorithm proposed by Resource leveling
The start time and completion time is divided into for projects with schedule-dependent time
the earliest start time ES j , the latest start windows [1]
, it depends on the priority rule to
time LS j , the earliest completion time ES j , and allocate activities into the schedule. The priority
the latest completion time LS j . And it is defined rule of selecting the next activity is based on both
that: Latest Start Time (LST) and Greatest Resource
Demand (GRD). To be more detailed, first

LS j  S j  EC j for t  0,...d  1 (7) calculate the latest start time of all activities, find
out the activity with the smallest LST. In the case
that more than one activity have the same
Therefore, the total float time
smallest LST, more calculation will be performed
is TFj  LS j  ES j  LC j  EC j . In this research,
on these activities using GRD and the activity
the activities that enable TFj  0 are called
with the largest GRD will be selected as the final
critical activities, because the positions of these
candidate to be allocated into the schedule.
activities cannot be changed from the beginning
LST Latest Start Time
of the production period. As a result, these
activities should be allocated into the schedule extiu (i )  min
iu
LSi (10)
immediately, therefore, the start times of these
GRD Greatest Resource Demand
critical activities should be S j  ES j . In
k
reference Resource leveling for projects with extiu (i )  max
iu
pi  rik (11)
k 1
[1]
schedule-dependent time windows , the
algorithm proposed by the author re-defines
the ES j and LS j of an activity j after the activity
3.5 TSSA algorithm
is allocated into the schedule by considering the
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.

In this chapter, the TSSA approach proposed in
this paper will be described in details. It is known
that tabu search is a heuristic with memories, in
that searched paths are kept in the tabu list. In this
way, searched paths will not be searched again.
On the other hand, simulated annealing approach
employs a temperature-reducing process in which
neighboring solutions worse than the current
solution can be accepted by a certain ratio for a
specific temperature. At a high temperature, such
ratio is high; while with the temperature
reduction, the ratio also becomes lower. Such
feature gives simulated annealing a stronger
ability to carry out the global search. However, as
the same searching area may be searched many
times, the search efficiency is hampered. Hence,
in this research, TSSA algorithm is proposed to
combine the advantages of simulated annealing
and tabu search. Simulated annealing is employed
at first to search the optimal solution, which the
searched areas are stored into the tabu list to
avoid repeated searches. In the meanwhile, the
advantage of simulated annealing, that
neighboring solutions worse than the current
solution may also be accepted, is preserved,
which gives TSSA a strong search ability.

Start
PART 1

Generate an initial solution and calculate the objective value, and set initial

Store the initial solution to tabu list and store the objective value to the best
objective value
PART 6

End Yes T < 0.005

No
PART 2

Generate a neighborhood solution

If new solution is not tabu

No

Yes

Calculate the objective value of the new solution. Iteration + 1

If new objective value better

No than the best objective value

Yes
PART 4 PART 3
No
Exp (-△V/T) > random [0,1] Store the new solution and objective value
Yes

Iteration times bigger than given max

times No

Yes
PART 5

Current T * cooling rate, set iteration times = 0

Figure 1 Flow chart of TSSA algorithm

 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.

The procedure of TSSA algorithm proposed in activity j and its predecessors and its successors
this research can be described as follows: are calculated as follows:

PART 1 : Initial solution: an initial solution is ESi  max( ESi ,( Si  d ji )) (12)

obtained by using the algorithm proposed by for all i  j predecessor
Resource leveling for projects with LSi  min( LSi ,( S j  d ij )) (13)
schedule-dependent time windows [1]
of which a for all i  j successors
brief introduction will be given in the following.
The algorithm of literature can be largely divided For all activity i , a new TFi can be obtained.

into two parts: Step 1, Step 2, Step 1 is the Then, check again if any activity satisfies

initialization. First, get the sequence relations TF  0 after its ES j and LS j are updated.

between all activities, calculate the distances If there are such activities, these activities will be

d ijmin and d ijmax between the activities, then considered critical activities and be put into the

initiate the ES j and LS j of all activities, and set M . Furthermore, the start time of these

check if any activity satisfies the activities will be updated as Si  ESi . Then

condition TFj  0 . If some activities do satisfy update resource profile again. The above Step 1,

the condition, these activities will be allocated Step 2, and update resource profile are repeated

immediately, and the updating of resource profile again and again until all the activities have been

will be performed accordingly. Step 2 is the allocated into the schedule, which means the

scheduling of activities. First, select the next original algorithm is finished.

activity (activity j ) to be allocated into the

schedule by using the priority rules. The priority
rules are simply written as {LST , GRD} . The PART 2 : The neighborhood structure: the

schedule is made according to only one objective method to produce neighboring solutions is that

function at a time. As mentioned before, in order randomly select an activity in the current solution,

to define the optimal start time of activity j , re-calculate its earliest start time and latest start

ES j and LS j should be put into the objective time, and specify a new start time by using a

function, respectively, the their impact on the random distributed number, in this way, a

resource profile will be reflected in the objective neighboring solution produced.

value. In this way, an optimal start time of

PART 3 : Tabu list: the basic concept of tabu
activity j can be obtained according to the
list is that searched areas should be avoided to be
minimum objective value. In the case that more
searched again. In this research, a neighboring
than one optimal start time exist, the earliest start
solution is only different in the start time of one
time will be selected as the start time of activity j .
activity. Hence, in the tabu list, only the activity
After that, activity j will be put into a set M
index and the new start time of the activity are
that stores all the activities whose start times have
stored. The length of the tabu list is fixed, and the
been determined. Then, the relations between
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.

oldest information stored in the tabu list will be 4.1 Parameter set for experimental cases
deleted when the list is full and more new
information is coming into the list.
In the following, the parameter setting in this
paper will be detailed. The parameters in this
PART 4 : Metropolis acceptance criteria: this is
paper include the initial temperature, final
a mechanism that simulated annealing features,
temperature, cooling rate and tabu length. The
which is activated when a neighboring solution
setting of parameters as follows:
worse than the current solution is produced. At
first, a random number is produced within the
Initial temperature: 15
range [0,1], then an exponential value is
generated according to the current temperature Final temperature: 0.005
and the difference between the current solution
and the neighboring solution. If the exponential Cooling rate: 0.96

value is greater than the random number, the

Times of temperature reduction: 197
neighboring solution worse than the current
solution will be accepted. Therefore, when the Tabu length: 55
temperature is high, such solutions are more
likely to be accepted; and when the temperature
gets lower, it gets harder and harder for such Besides, the benchmark problem used in this
solutions to be accepted. The formula is given as: paper is never used on resource leveling problems
by other researchers except Resource leveling for
PART 5 : Cooling scheme: when a certain
projects with schedule-dependent time windows
times of loop are finished, TSSA will
automatically reduce the temperature by using the [1]
, therefore, in this research, in order to obtain
following equation:
near-optimal solution, increase the initial
New temperature  current tempterature  cooling rate (14) temperature to 60 and the cooling rate to 0.99.

PART 6 : Termination criteria: the TSSA 4.2 Experiment result

algorithm will terminate when the temperature of

TSSA has reduced to the final temperature. 20 examples have been selected in this
research for simulation. For each example, an
initial schedule, or initial solution, is first
4 Simulation Result
obtained by the algorithm proposed in the
The proposed TSSA algorithm was reference literature. After that, the TSSA
implemented in JAVA language on a personal proposed in this paper will be used to search the
computer Pentium 3.0GHz. In order to evaluate optimal solution for resource leveling based on
and compare the performance of TSSA algorithm, the initial solution. The simulation data is given
we tested on the 20 well-known cases taken from in the table 1 below:
ProGen.
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.

Table 1 Result of simulation

Case No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Initial
590.8 534.3 765.9 665 1137 297 884.8 428.4 465.3 831.6 381.6 722.4 275 708.8 478.4 492 698.4 834 477 712.4
solution

Simulation
TSSA Evaluated Value
No.

Min. 438.2 505.7 731.7 639. 1120.2 186.0 875.0 260.4 352.8 828.8 301.0 683.2 221.1 683.2 456.0 379.2 538.0 312.0 438.0 523.9

Max. 467.6 526.5 733.5 648.0 1120.0 201.0 875.0 285.0 362.0 831.0 328.0 683.0 243.0 683.0 478.0 408.0 557.1 387.6 440.0 535.0

Avg. 444.0 514.8 732.5 640.7 1120.2 192.0 875.0 264.6 354.8 829.5 320.1 683.0 233.2 683.0 466.0 389.0 541.8 361.6 438.0 527.2

Standard
9.47 7.99 0.51 3.49 0.00 6.20 0.00 8.16 4.17 0.99 9.88 0.00 10.64 0.00 11.14 10.92 6.09 21.64 0.97 3.42
Deviation

Near-optim
438.2 505.7 731.7 639.1 1120.0 173.0 875.0 248.4 352.8 828.0 249.0 683.2 217.0 683.2 456.0 379.2 456.3 310.8 438.0 523.9
al
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.

4.3 Experiment analysis

From simulation results, two important conclusions can be got. First, significant improvement can be
made by TSSA to the initial solution got by using the algorithm proposed in the reference literature. This
proves that it is an effective way to re-calculate the start time of the initial activity and adjust the start
time. Second, it can be noticed that the solutions got by TSSA are very similar to near-optimal solutions.
This proves that the TSSA algorithm, which combines tabu search and simulated annealing, has a strong
ability of searching and is able to find solutions similar or equivalent to near-optimal solutions.

Four figures are given to show the results of simulation:

Blue color: initial solution

Red color: TSSA solution

Orange color: near-optimal solution

T he fig ure of sim ulation result

1200

1000

800
Objective value

literature
600 TSSA min.
near-optimal
400

200

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Case No.

Figure 2 Comparison between initial solution, the minimal value of TSSA and near-optimal

T he fig ure of sim ulation result

1200

1000

800
Objctive value

literature
600 TSSA max.
near-optimal
400

200

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Case No.

Figure 3 Comparison between initial solution, the maximal value of TSSA and near-optimal
The fig ure of sim ulation result

1200

1000

800
Objective value

literature
600 TSSA avg.
near-optimal
400

200

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Case No.

Figure 4 Comparison between initial solution, the average value of TSSA and near-optimal
The standard dev iation of TSSA

25.00

20.00
Standard deviation value

15.00
TSSA
10.00

5.00

0.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Case No.

Figure 5 Standard deviation of TSSA

5 Conclusions

This research aims at resource leveling. The benchmark used in this research is the activity scheduling
obtained according to resource limitations (resource upper limit and the unit cost of the resource). There
are maximal time interval and minimal time interval between each two activities. Resource leveling for
projects with schedule-dependent time windows [1] used the same benchmark problem for resource
leveling research, and proposed an algorithm in which each activity is given an optimal start time by
using a priority rule, and after that, the activity is arranged into the schedule with that start time.
 First Ruei-Bin Jung, Second Wen-Chung Chang.

However, the proposed algorithm of Resource leveling for projects with schedule-dependent time
windows [1] did not adjust the start times of activities that have already been arranged into the schedule.
Therefore, improvements have been made in this aspect in this research. First, an initial solution is got by
the algorithm of Resource leveling for projects with schedule-dependent time windows [1], after that,
TSSA algorithm which combines tabu search and simulated annealing is used to improve the initial
solution. In Chapter 4, the analysis of experimental data proved that the TSSA algorithm proposed in this
paper can not only improve the initial solution, but also achieve a near-optimal solution. Therefore,
TSSA heuristic is proved to be very effective for such resource leveling problems.

The future work

1. The resource leveling research can be continued on multiple resource problems instead of the
single resource problem described in this research.
2. Take into account more limitations of real-word production in research, for example: the processing
time of activity is not fixed, which may cause the earliness cost (inventory cost) and tardiness cost
(penalty).

References

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