European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346

Theory and Methodology

Computing lower bounds by destructive improvement:

An application to resource-constrained project scheduling
Robert Klein *, Armin Scholl
Institut f
ur Betriebswirtschaftslehre, Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, Fachgebiet OR, Hochschulstrasse 1, D-64289 Darmstadt,
Germany
Received 1 July 1997; accepted 30 October 1997

Abstract

In this paper, two meta-strategies for computing lower bounds (for minimization problems) are described. Con-
structive (direct) methods directly calculate a bound value by relaxing a problem and solving this relaxation. Destructive
improvement techniques restrict a problem by setting a maximal objective function value F and try to contradict (de-
struct) the feasibility of this reduced problem. In case of success, F or even F + 1 is a valid lower bound value. The
fundamental properties and di€erences of both meta-strategies are explained by applying them to the well-known re-
source-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). For this problem, only a few constructive bound arguments
are available in the literature. We present a number of extensions and new methods as well as techniques for reducing
problem data which can be exploited within the destructive improvement framework. Comprehensive numerical ex-
periments show that the new constructive bound arguments clearly provide better bounds than the former ones and that
further really signi®cant improvements are obtained through an appropriate application of destructive improve-
ment. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Scheduling theory; Project management; Bounding techniques

1. The problem mized. Realizing the project requires performing a

We present di€erent methods for computing
lower bounds for the NP-hard resource-con-
strained project scheduling problem (RCPSP).
This well-known problem can be stated as follows:
A project has to be realized such that its duration
or, equivalently, its total completion time is mini-
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 6151 16 3964; fax: +49
6151 16 6504; e-mail: rklein@bwl.tu-darmstadt.de
set of jobs J ˆ f1; . . . ; ng, each of which has a
given duration dj (in number of periods with
j ˆ 1; . . . ; n). No preemption of jobs is allowed,
i.e., whenever a job has started in a period t it must
be performed consecutively during the periods
t; t ‡ 1; . . . ; t ‡ dj ÿ 1. Due to technological re-
strictions, precedence constraints, de®ning end-
start relationships between the jobs, may exist.
Within a project, jobs which may be performed
concurrently compete for a number of di€erent
resource types (workers, machines, budgets).

0377-2217/99/$ ± see front matter Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 3 7 7 - 2 2 1 7 ( 9 7 ) 0 0 4 4 2 - 6
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
Whenever the availability of a resource type is not
sucient to satisfy the requirements, those jobs
must not be performed simultaneously and re-
source constraints have to be observed. The basic
type of the RCPSP considers m (renewable) re-
source types, de®ned by the index set
R ˆ f1; . . . ; mg. In each period of the planning
horizon, a type r is available in a constant number
ar of units …r ˆ 1; . . . ; m†. Performing a job j re-
quires ujr units of type r in each period. The
RCPSP is to ®nd a non-preemptive schedule of the
jobs, i.e., a set of starting times, such that the
precedence and resource constraints are satis®ed
and the project duration is minimized.
The structure of a project can be represented by
a network diagram with jobs as nodes, durations
as node weights, and precedence constraints as
arcs. Arcs between two jobs which are also con-
nected by any path containing more than one arc
are redundant and can be omitted. Fig. 1 shows a
project with n ˆ 12 jobs and one renewable re-
source …m ˆ 1† which is available with a1 ˆ 4 units
per period. Job 1 and job n are dummy start and
terminal nodes with duration 0.
In the last decades, a large variety of solution
procedures have been proposed for RCPSP.
Among the heuristics, priority-rule based ap-
proaches, based on the serial and parallel sched-
uling schemes, are the most important (e.g.
Fig. 1. Project network.
323
Alvarez-Valdez and Tamarit, 1989; Boctor, 1990;
Kolisch, 1996; Thomas and Salhi, 1997). For ex-
actly solving RCPSP a number of branch and
bound procedures have been developed (e.g. Stin-
son et al., 1978; Talbot and Patterson, 1978;
Christo®des et al., 1987; Carlier and Latapie, 1991;
Demeulemeester and Herroelen, 1992; Mingozzi et
al., 1995; Brucker et al., 1996; Sprecher, 1996).
However, only small-sized and medium-sized
problem instances with up to 30 jobs can be solved
exactly in a satisfactory manner. Since clever
branching strategies are available this is mainly
due to the lack of strong lower bounds.
In Section 2, we present basic concepts for
computing lower bounds for RCPSP proposed in
the literature so far. We restrict ourselves to
methods which can be realized with small com-
putational e€ort by using the special problem
structure of RCPSP and exclude approaches based
on LP or Lagrangean relaxation. LP relaxation
based approaches have been presented by Chris-
to®des et al. (1987), Mingozzi et al. (1995) as well
as Brucker et al. (1996). The latter two consider a
reformulation of RCPSP based on all ``feasible''
subsets of jobs, i.e., all combinations of jobs,
which may be performed simultaneously without
violating precedence or resource constraints. Its
LP relaxation corresponds to allowing preemption
of jobs. Since the number of feasible subsets grows
324 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
exponentially with the number of jobs, the com-
putational e€ort is very high, though the quality of
bounds obtained is good. Determining all feasible
subsets in advance can be avoided by using the
technique of column generation for solving the
RCPSP with preemption as proposed in Weglarz
et al. (1977). Lagrangean relaxation based ap-
proaches can be found in Fisher (1973) and
Christo®des et al. (1987).
Section 3 is devoted to introducing new direct
bound arguments which utilize relationships to
other optimization problems and can favourably
exploit the special problem structure of RCPSP. In
Section 4, the new meta-strategy ``destructive im-
provement'' is discussed and contrasted with tra-
ditional concepts of computing bounds. Section 5
shows its application to RCPSP based on tech-
niques for reducing the problem data and adapted
direct bound arguments. Computational results
indicating considerably improved bound values for
standard benchmark data sets are reported in
Section 6. Section 7 contains conclusions which
can be drawn from this research and discusses
future research tasks.
2. Literature based bound arguments for RCPSP
Critical path bound (LB1): The most obvious
lower bound is based on omitting the capacity
restrictions. Then the minimal project duration is
obtained by computing the length of a critical
(longest) path in the project network. For de-
scribing this calculation the following notation is
introduced:
Pj =Fj set of jobs which immediately precede/
follow job j
ESj =LSj earliest/latest starting time of job j
EFj =LFj earliest/latest ®nishing time of job j
A forward pass, which can be realized in O…n2 †
time, yields earliest starting and ®nishing times for
all jobs, with LB1 (length of the critical path) being
equal to the earliest starting time of the terminal
Subsequently, latest ®nishing and starting times
may be computed by a backward pass beginning
with LFn ˆ LSn ˆ LB1:
LFj ˆ minfLSh jh 2 Fj g; LSj ˆ LFj ÿ dj
for j ˆ n ÿ 1; . . . ; 1: …2†
For each job j, the interval ‰ESj ; LFj Š de®nes a
time window in which j has to be processed if the
project should be completed after LB1 time units.
In our example, the critical path is
C ˆ h1; 3; 6; 8; 11; 12i with total duration LB1 ˆ 16
periods (cf. Fig. 1).
Capacity bound (LB2): This rather simple
bound argument, which can be computed in
O…mn† time, discards all but one resource type. A
bound value is computed as the total requirement
of this resource divided by its per period avail-
ability and rounded up to the next larger integer.
In the example, we obtain LB2 ˆ d66=4e ˆ 17.
(& ! ' )
X n
LB2 ˆ max ujr dj =ar jr ˆ 1; . . . ; m :
jˆ1
…3†
Critical sequence bound (LB3): A job j is said to
be incompatible to another job h if both jobs can-
not be processed in parallel. This is true if they are
either related by precedence or their cumulated
capacity requirement exceeds the supply for any
resource r. The critical sequence bound adds ca-
pacity considerations to the critical path bound
(cf. Stinson et al., 1978). Imagine the jobs of a
critical path C being scheduled one immediately
after its predecessor. Processing some job j 62 C in
parallel to the critical path requires that within the
time window ‰ESj ; LFj Š there is an interval with
minimum length dj during which the residual ca-
pacity is no smaller than ujr for each resource type
r. Let emax
j be the maximal length of such an in-
terval. In case of emax
j < dj , job j cannot be pro-
cessed completely and the project cannot be
terminated within less than LB1 ‡ dj ÿ emax j peri-
ods. Hence, a lower bound LB3 is de®ned as:
dummy job. Starting with ES ˆ EF1 ˆ 0 we obtain: 
n n oo

ESj ˆ maxfEFi ji 2 Pj g; LB3 ˆ LB1 ‡ max 0; max dj ÿ emax
j j 62 C :
EFj ˆ ESj ‡ dj for j ˆ 2; . . . ; n: …1† …4†
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
Example: Consider the partial schedule built by
the critical path C ˆ h1; 3; 6; 8; 11; 12i of our ex-
ample given in Fig. 2. With LB1 ˆ 16 we obtain
the time windows and values emax j of the remaining
jobs shown in Table 1. For example, consider job
7 which is incompatible to all jobs but 6. Due to
ES7 ˆ 6 we get emax7 ˆ 1. Hence, job 7 requires 3
further periods. The same is true for job 2 and
LB3 ˆ 19.
Both determining the critical path as well as
computing the values emaxj , can be done in O…n2 †
time. Since this is done consecutively, the overall
complexity of LB3 is O…n2 †, too. Two extensions
of LB3 have been proposed trying to consider
several jobs, which cannot be processed within
their time windows, simultaneously:
· Demeulemeester (1992) determines a lower
bound on the minimal project completion time
necessary to schedule a further sequence of jobs
along to those on a critical path. The sequence
starts with a job h and ends with one of its (in-
direct) successors j. Both jobs are chosen such
that they cannot completely be processed within
their time windows, i.e. emax
h < dh and emax
j < dj .
Additionally, the sequence contains all jobs
building a single path between h and j. The low-
er bound value can be obtained by a pseudo-
polynomial dynamic programming approach
and is calculated for all possible combinations
of h and j.
· Brucker et al. (1996) consider a critical path as
well as an additional disjoint path through the
Fig. 2. Computation of LB3.
325
Table 1
Time windows
Job 2 4 5 7 9 10
dj 3 1 3 4 6 4
ESj 0 0 3 6 7 7
LFj 5 5 8 12 16 16
emax 0 0 5 1 9 9
j
project network. The nodes on each path are in-
terpreted as a task sequence building two jobs in
a job-shop problem with the objective of mini-
mizing the completion time. Task pairs from
the di€erent jobs for which simultaneous pro-
cessing causes a resource con¯ict in the original
RCPSP instance must not be executed in paral-
lel, whereas this is possible for all other pairs.
Identifying such imcompatible task pairs takes
O…mn2 † time and subsequently solving the job-
shop problem, which gives a lower bound for
RCPSP, has complexity O…n log n†. In order to
improve on this bound, additional jobs which
can still not be scheduled within their time win-
dows, are considered.
Node packing bound (LB4): Another lower
bound is based on solving a weighted node pack-
ing problem (cf. Mingozzi et al., 1995). It consists
of ®nding a subset S of jobs each of which is in-
compatible to any other one within this set. These
jobs must be scheduled sequentially thereby de-
®ning a lower bound equal to the sum of their
durations. A heuristic solution to this weighted
node packing problem can be found as follows.
First the set of all jobs is sorted and stored in an
ordered list. The ®rst job is removed from the list
and added to S. All jobs being compatible to this
job are deleted from the list. This process is re-
peated until the list is empty. The total duration of
jobs in S de®nes a lower bound LB4. Di€erent
solutions can be obtained by applying several
sorting criteria (cf. Mingozzi et al., 1995; Demeu-
lemeester and Herroelen, 1997). An obvious ap-
proach is to set the jobs of a critical path at the
®rst positions followed by the remaining jobs in
increasing order of the number of jobs which can
be processed in parallel to the job considered. This
rule re¯ects the fact that as many jobs as possible
should remain in the list after each iteration.
326 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
Additionally, the list is cyclically rotated and the
procedure is applied repeatedly. An improved
version of the node packing bound does not
completely delete from the list a job h being
compatible to a job j just added to S (de Reyck
and Herroelen, 1996b). Instead, if dh > dj , job h
stays in the list with modi®ed duration
dh :ˆ dh ÿ dj . Since the list has to be processed
once completely and updating the remaining jobs
requires checking all resource constraints, the
computational complexity of LB4 is O…mn2 †, if
rotation is omitted.
Example: The list may be L ˆ h3; 6; 8; 11; 4; 2;
7; 5; 9; 10i according to the sorting criterion men-
tioned above. The jobs 3,6,8,11 of the critical path
are successively included in S, because they are
incompatible to each other. After considering job
3, job 5 is deleted. Job 6 requires reducing the
duration of jobs 2 and 7 to d2 ˆ 1 and d7 ˆ 2.
Including job 8 and 11 results in deleting the jobs 9
and 10. Now only job 4 and the remainders of 2
and 7, which are incompatible to each other, re-
main. Therefore, they are included in S resulting in
a bound LB4 ˆ 16 ‡ 1 ‡ 1 ‡ 2 ˆ 20. The original
version of the node packing bound, which con-
siders complete jobs only, would give a lower
bound value of 17.
Parallel-machine bound (LB5): This bound is
based on the relaxation of RCPSP to a special
parallel-machine scheduling problem (cf. Carlier
and Latapie, 1991) which can be described as fol-
lows: A set S of jobs has to be performed on k
identical parallel machines with at most one job
being processed on each machine at a time. At the
beginning of the planning horizon, not all of the
jobs are available immediately. This may, e.g., be
due to preprocessing or restricted availability of
materials. The amount of time which has to pass
before a job j becomes available on the machines is
called head aj of j. Analogously, terminating a job
j may require additional time after leaving the
machines, e.g., for post-processing, called tail @j of
j. The objective of the parallel-machine problem is
to ®nd a sequence of all jobs for which the make-
span, i.e., the amount of time necessary for ter-
minating all jobs, is minimized.
A subset of jobs of the original RCPSP instance
for which it is known that at most k jobs of the
subset can be performed at a time may be inter-
preted as a set S of jobs to be scheduled on k
parallel machines. Additionally, heads and tails for
those jobs may be derived using the information
inherent to earliest and latest starting and ®nishing
times. Since ESj is a lower bound on the starting
time of job j in the RCPSP instance, j cannot be
available earlier on a ``machine''. Hence aj ˆ ESj
for all j 2 S. Accordingly, tails @j may be deter-
mined. At least @j ˆ LFn ÿ LFj periods have to
pass after performing j before the whole project is
completed. By analogy, having processed job j on
one of the machines, a tail of @j periods is neces-
sary for its termination.
To determine a set S of jobs for a given value of
k, Carlier and Latapie (1991) discard all but one
resource type r. Since for each type r several sub-
sets of jobs de®ning a parallel machine problem
may exist, they present an approach for enumer-
ating all of them, which results in a rather high
total computational e€ort. Therefore, we describe
a restricted approach to determine a single subset S
for each resource type r: S contains all jobs j with
their demand ujr not being less than
umin
r ˆ bar =…k ‡ 1†c ‡ 1, because at most k of them
can be processed in parallel. Performing a job j
requires at least b ˆ bujr =umin r c machines. There-
fore, b copies of j are included in S, i.e., j is rep-
licated b ÿ 1 times.
Exactly solving a parallel-machine problem
de®ned by a set S of jobs yields a lower bound on
the completion time of the underlying RCPSP in-
stance. Since the parallel-machine problem is NP-
hard, the e€ort may usually be too high. Never-
theless, bound arguments on hand for the parallel-
machine problem can be applied. For S 0  S being
an arbitrary subset of S, a lower bound on the
makespan can be calculated by
2 3
X
M…S 0 † ˆ minfaj jj 2 S 0 g ‡ 6 7
6 dj =k 7
6 j2S 0 7
‡ minf@j jj 2 S 0 g: …5†
The maximum of all those values M…S 0 † for any
S 0  S de®nes a lower bound on RCPSP. It can be
computed in O…n3 † by systematically considering
all pairs of values ah and @i with h; i 2 S and
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
ah 6 ai ; @h P @i . The maximal set S 0 corresponding
to ah and @i being the minimum head and tail in
Eq. (5) contains all jobs j 2 S (including h and i)
which ful®ll ah 6 aj and @j P @i . The computa-
tional e€ort can be reduced to O…n2 † by consider-
ing the pairs …ah ; @i † following a lexicographic
ordering. Then the sets S 0 and the corresponding
sums of job durations are derived from the pre-
ceding pair by a constant time update. An alter-
native and more complex method of computing S 0
is presented in Carlier and Latapie (1991).
For each resource type r, a set S is constructed
as described above and the maximal M…S 0 † with
S 0  S is computed. The maximum of all bound
values obtained in this manner serves as LB5.
Example: Applying a forward and backward
pass to our project of Fig. 1 results in the heads
and tails of jobs given in Table 2. If we consider
k ˆ 1 (one-machine problem) for the single re-
source r ˆ 1, we get umin r ˆ 3 and S ˆ f3; 4; 8g.
Evaluating Eq. (5) for all subsets of S gives the
maximal bound value M…S 0 ˆ f3; 4g† ˆ 0 ‡ 5‡
1 ‡ 11 ˆ 17, whereas M…f3; 4; 8g† ˆ 15. For k ˆ 2,
we obtain uminr ˆ 2 and S ˆ f3; 4; 8; 7; 2g all jobs
requiring at least b ˆ 1 machine. The maximal
bound value is determined by M…f2; 3; 4g† ˆ
0 ‡ d9=2e ‡ 11 ˆ 16. For k ˆ 3, we again obtain
umin
r ˆ 2 and S ˆ f3; 4; 8; 7; 2g yielding the weaker
value M…f2; 3; 4g† ˆ 0 ‡ d9=3e ‡11 ˆ 14. In case
of k ˆ 4, we have umin r ˆ 1 so that each job is
contained in lP S in m ˆ ujr copies. Hence,
b number of jobs which may be processed in parallel
M…S† ˆ 0 ‡ j ujr dj =ar ‡ 0 ˆ 17: This value is
maximal, because no subset of S gives a better
value in Eq. (5). The best overall bound value is
LB5 ˆ 17.
Remark 1. For each value of k, the computational
complexity of LB5 is O…mn2 †. As indicated by the
example in case of k ˆ 4, LB5 always gives results
at least as good as LB2 when k ˆ ar is examined
Table 2
Heads and tails of jobs
2 3 4 5
aj ˆ ESj 0 0 0 3
LFj 5 5 5 8
@j ˆ LFn ÿ LFj 11 11 11 8 9
327
for each resource type r. Furthermore, it can be
seen that it may be helpful, in particular when ar is
small, to determine the number b of copies more
carefully, because, e.g., for k ˆ 2 the jobs with
ujr ˆ 3 actually could be duplicated.
3. New lower bound arguments for RCPSP
Extended node packing bound (LB6): LB4 can
be improved by applying additional bound argu-
ments to a residual project instance consisting of
the jobs remaining in the list after each iteration.
These jobs are considered with their reduced du-
rations. The corresponding precedence network is
derived from the original one by deleting all nodes
representing jobs removed from the list, preserving
original direct and indirect precedence relations.
The best bound value obtained for the residual
instance may be added to the total duration of jobs
currently in S thereby de®ning a lower bound on
the initial instance in each iteration. The maximum
of those values serves as LB6.
To keep the computational e€ort low, we only
use the simple bound arguments LB1 and LB2 for
evaluating the residual projects. Due to applying
LB1 anyway, it is no longer appropriate to put the
jobs of the critical path at the beginning of the list.
Instead, jobs are sorted in increasing order of the
as proposed by Demeulemeester and Herroelen
(1997). Ties are broken according to longer job
durations so that among a set of pairwise com-
patible jobs the longest one is preferred.
In each of O…n† iterations, updating S and re-
moving jobs from the list requires time O…mn†.
Applying LB1 and LB2 to the residual project
takes time O…n2 † and O…m†, respectively. Thus, the
total complexity is O…n…mn ‡ n2 ††.
6 7 8 9 10 11
5 6 7 7 7 12
7 12 12 16 16 16
4 4 0 0 0
328 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
Example: Using the adapted sorting criterion,
we obtain the list L ˆ h3; 4; 11; 8; 7; 2; 6; 9; 10; 5i.
After successively including the pairwise incom-
patible jobs 3,4,11, and 8 in S and
P removing 5,9,
and 10 from the list, we obtain j2S dj ˆ 15. For
the residual instance de®ned by the remaining jobs
2,6, and 7 with original durations, the critical path
consists of the jobs 2 and 7 with a length of
LB1 ˆ 7. The capacity bound only gives
LB2 ˆ d…3
2 ‡ 2
1 ‡ 4
2†=4e ˆ 4. Hence, a
bound value of 22 is reached in this iteration. Since
no better value is found in another iteration,
LB6 ˆ 22.
Generalized node packing bound (LB7): We
describe a further extension of the node packing
bound LB4. In general, one may identify a subset
S of the jobs any triplet of which is incompatible,
i.e., no subset of three or more jobs can be
scheduled in parallel, either due to precedence or
resource constraints. Furthermore, some jobs from
S (forming a subset S1 ) may be incompatible to
any other (single) job of S and must be performed
exclusively. Then a lower bound on the project
duration is de®ned as follows …LB2…S† denotes the
application of LB2 to a subset S of jobs):
X LB6. Beyond these extensions, LB6 and LB7 can
LB7…S† ˆ dj
j2S1
Example: Sorting the jobs as mentioned above
yields the list L ˆ h3; 8; 6; 4; 7; 11; 2; 5; 9; 10i. After
four iterations S1 ˆ S ˆ f3; 8; 6; 4g is obtained.
Now, job 7 has to be added. Since it is compatible
to 6, both are members of S but not of S1 . The
current bound is LB7…S† ˆ 11 ‡ maxfd…2
1 ‡ 4

2†=4e; d6=2eg ˆ 14. The maximum bound value
LB7(S) ˆ 20 is obtained two iterations later for
S1 ˆ f3; 8; 4; 11g and S ˆ S1 [ f6; 7; 2g. After in-
cluding 5 and 9, the process stops, because job 10
cannot be added due to, e.g., the compatible triplet
2,9,10.
Remark 2. LB7 may be extended. According to
LB4, jobs may be included in S or S1 with reduced
durations rather than deleting them completely.
So, one part of a job may belong only to S and
another one also to S1 . In the example, a bound
value of LB7(S) ˆ 21 is yielded for S ˆf3; 8; 6; 4; 7;
11; 2g. The increase compared to above is due to
the jobs 7 and 2, now partially contained in S1 with
durations 2 and 1, respectively.
Additionally, LB1 and LB2 are applied to an
appropriately de®ned residual instance as done for
be generalized by considering k-tuples …k  4† of
jobs, which cannot be processed simultaneously.
8 0 1, 3 9 The computational complexity is O…mnk †. Instead,
<  X =
 in order to avoid such high computational e€ort,
‡ max LB2…S ÿS1 †; @ d j A 27
7 : …6†
:  j2SÿS1 † 7;
The set S may be determined heuristically as in
case of LB4. For example, each job may be given a
priority value equal to the number of compatible
triplets in which it is contained. The jobs are
considered in increasing order of the priority val-
ues. Ties are broken in favour of longer job du-
rations. A job is added to S whenever it is
incompatible to any pair of jobs already con-
tained. If it is even incompatible to any single job
of S, it also becomes a member of S1 . Otherwise, its
inclusion causes at least one job to be removed
from S1 (but not from S). Always after adding a
job, the expression LB7(S) is evaluated and the
maximum of all those values serves as LB7. Due to
checking triplets of jobs concerning m resource
types, LB7 requires O…mn3 † time.
all but one capacity constraint can be discarded.
Then, di€erent sets S could be determined like in
the case of LB5.
One-machine bound (LB8): Within the frame-
work of LB4 a weighted node packing problem is
solved in order to ®nd a subset S of jobs which are
incompatible to each other. Since at most one job
out of this set can be performed at a time, a cor-
responding one-machine problem can be de®ned
which is a special case of the parallel-machine
problem …k ˆ 1† considered by LB5. Following
this idea, LB8 proceeds as follows. A subset S of
jobs is determined heuristically according to LB4.
In each iteration of constructing S, formula (5) is
applied for S 0 ˆ S yielding a lower bound M(S).
Note that Eq. (5) can easily be evaluated by up-
dating its expressions in constant time. Therefore,
the complete process takes time O…mn2 †.
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
Since LB8, in contrast to LB4, considers heads
and tails, a more suitable sorting criterion for the
priority list is used. For each job j, the center of its
time window is computed by CTj ˆ …ESj ‡
LFj †=2. Starting with an arbitrary job q, the jobs
are added to S in order of increasing absolute
distances of their centers CTj to CTq . Ties are
broken in favour of the smallest number of jobs
which can be processed in parallel to the job
considered. This sorting rule follows the idea that
it is advantageous to select jobs for S which have
similar values of heads and tails, respectively. In
this case, the sum of the minimum terms of Eq. (5)
tends to become large. The maximum of the values
M(S) obtained during constructing S de®nes a
lower bound LB8(q).
Example: We consider q ˆ 3 with ES3 ˆ 0;
LF3 ˆ 5 and CT3 ˆ 2:5 (see Table 2). Applying
the sorting criterion results in the list
L ˆ h3; 4; 2; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11i. Following the usual
process of constructing S we add the jobs 3,4,2
thereby discarding 5 and 6 and reducing the du-
rations of 9 and 10 to 3 and 1, respectively. The
jobs j 2 f3; 4; 2g may start immediately at time
aj ˆ 0. Since all have the tail @j ˆ 11, we obtain
M…f3; 4; 2g† ˆ 0 ‡ 9 ‡ 11 ˆ 20. Two iterations la-
ter, we get M…f3; 4; 2; 7; 8g† ˆ 0 ‡ 18 ‡ 4 ˆ 22
which is the maximal value de®ning LB8(q ˆ 3).
In order to construct di€erent sets S, each job in
turn is used as the start job q yielding an over-
all lower bound LB8 ˆ maxfLB8…q†j q ˆ 2; . . . ;
n ÿ 1g.
Two-machine bound (LB9): It is obvious, that
LB7 and LB5 may be combined in the same
fashion as described above. In this case, a parallel-
machine problem with k ˆ 2 is present, because at
most two jobs may be processed simultaneously.
The set of tasks to be considered is determined as
follows. Starting with an arbitrary job q, the heu-
ristic of LB7 is applied combined with the sorting
criterion of LB8. This results in a set S and a
subset S1 , which contains all jobs being incom-
patible to all other jobs in S. As is the case with
LB8, formula (5) is evaluated always after adding
a job to S. For this purpose, a set S 0 is formed
which contains all jobs from S and a copy of each
job currently in S1 . Following Remark 2, a job
may be part of S1 with a reduced duration. Then,
329
only this part is duplicated. By analogy with LB8,
the bound LB9 is determined as the maximum
value found starting with each job as q once. Each
of those iterations takes time O…mn3 †.
Example: The jobs are added to S according to the
list described for LB8 starting with q ˆ 3. In the ®fth
iteration, S ˆ f3; 4; 2; 5; 6g. The subset S1 consists of
a part of job 3 with reduced duration 2 and a part of
job 2 with reduced duration 1. The remainder of
those jobs has been removed from this set due to
adding the compatible jobs 5 and 6, respectively. The
set S 0 for applying Eq. (5) is composed of all jobs in S
and additional copies of the jobs 3 and 2 with their
reduced durations. We get M…f3; 2; 30 ; 20 ; 4; 5;
6g† ˆ 0‡ d17=2e‡ 8 ˆ 17. After assigning the jobs 8
and 7, which additionally become members of S1
with reduced durations of 2, M…f3; 4; 2;
30 ; 20 ; 5; 6; 7; 8; 70 ; 80 g† ˆ 0 ‡ d30=2e ‡ 4 ˆ 19 de®n-
ing the maximal bound value for q ˆ 3 is found.
Precedence bound 1 (LB10): This bound argu-
ment is based on considering incompatible pairs of
jobs. For any such pair …h; j† either a precedence
relation exists or their cumulated capacity re-
quirement exceeds the supply of any resource type
r. In the latter case, a so-called disjunctive prece-
dence relation can be de®ned, because h either must
be ®nished before j can be started or vice versa (cf.
Balas, 1970).
Therefore, lower bound values can be com-
puted by testing both directions of the disjunctive
precedence relation between any incompatible pair
of jobs. Consider such an incompatible pair …h; j†.
First a directed arc is temporarily introduced from
h to j thereby de®ning a test project TP…h; j†. To
this test project any bound argument for RCPSP
can be used to compute a lower bound LB…h; j† on
the project duration given that h is performed
before j. Analogously, a second test project
TP…j; h† is built by introducing a directed arc from
j to h and a lower bound LB…j; h† is determined. A
lower bound on the original RCPSP instance is
given by the minimum of LB…h; j† and LB…j; h†. A
lower bound LB10 is obtained by applying this test
to all incompatible pairs, computing LB1 for all
test projects and taking the maximal value found.
Example: Consider the incompatible job pair 7
and 8. Introducing the directed arc (7,8) and
applying LB1 results in LB(7,8) ˆ 19, while the
330 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
reverse arc (8,7) results in LB(8,7) ˆ 20. Since
evaluating the other incompatible pairs does not
give improved bounds, LB10 ˆ 19.
Precedence bound 2 (LB11): LB11 is an exten-
sion of LB10 to incompatible triplets of jobs. If no
pair of jobs contained in such a triplet is incom-
patible, the resource con¯ict can be resolved by
adding a single directed arc between one pair at a
time, in total de®ning six test projects (three pairs,
two directions). Otherwise, disjunctive precedence
relations between the jobs of each resource-in-
compatible pair have to be directed, whereas ex-
isting precedence relations are preserved. Due to six
sequences of three jobs being possible, up to six test
projects have to be considered. These test projects
are evaluated by applying a bound procedure,
giving a lower bound for each of them. Among the
values obtained, the minimum represents a lower
bound on the original RCPSP instance. Examining
all triplets of incompatible jobs and taking the
maximal value yields a lower bound LB11.
Example: Consider the triplet (2,3,4). Each pair
of those jobs is incompatible due to resource
constraints. For each of the six test projects, rep-
resenting all possible sequences, LB1 ˆ 20. Since
none of the other triplets yields an improved
bound, LB11 ˆ 20.
Remark 3. If the evaluation of test projects is
restricted to computing LB1, LB10 and LB11 can be
calculated eciently using heads and tails. Consider
an incompatible pair …h; j†. The length of the longest
path using arc …h; j† is equal to ah ‡ dh ‡ dj ‡ @j . If
this length exceeds LB1 for the initial project,
introducing …h; j† leads to a new critical path in
TP…h; j† containing the jobs h and j. Sequences for
incompatible triplets can be evaluated in the same
fashion. Since these computations take constant
time, LB10 can be computed in O…mn2 † time, which
is needed for determining all incompatible pairs.
The time complexity of LB11 is O…mn3 †.
4. Meta-strategies for computing lower bounds
Traditionally, lower bounds are computed by
relaxing the problem considered and solving the
relaxation exactly (or solving the dual of the re-
laxation heuristically). Usually, the most compli-
cating restrictions are relaxed or even omitted. By
relaxing complicating restrictions important in-
formation about the special problem structure
often get lost such that bounds may be rather
weak. Therefore, Lagrangean relaxation methods
incorporate restrictions into the objective function
by penalizing violations such that as many as
possible of those constraints can be ful®lled within
the solution of the relaxation (see e.g. Fisher,
1973). Another approach, which is called additive
bounding, successively solves di€erent relaxations
of the problem and combines results via the con-
cept of reduced costs (see e.g. Fischetti and Toth,
1989). However, such bound computations are
usually expensive and success in achieving strong
bounds is questionable. These traditional tech-
niques of computing lower bounds are referred to
as constructive or direct methods because they di-
rectly tackle the problem by constructing solutions
to relaxed problems.
We want to introduce a di€erent approach
which is called destructive improvement. Within
this new meta-strategy, lower bounds are obtained
by thoroughly examining trial bound values LB.
For example, one may consider a bound value LB
for a problem P determined by any constructive
method. The value LB is utilized to restrict the set
of feasible solutions by setting LB as the maximal
value of the objective function allowed. If this re-
stricted set of feasible solutions is empty, the ob-
jective function value of the optimal solution of P
must exceed the value LB. Therefore LB+1 is a
new lower bound (provided that the objective
function values are integral). In order to ®nd out
whether a feasible solution with its objective
function value not exceeding LB may exist or not,
two steps are performed.
To be more speci®c, let us consider a general
formulation of problem P as an integer linear
program where the linear objective function f …x† is
restricted to integer values whenever the vector x is
integral:
…P† Minimize f …x† …7†
subject to A
x ˆ b;
x P 0 and integer: …8†
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346 331

A restricted problem P…LB† is obtained by addi- Obviously, no integer value is feasible for x1
tionally enforcing f …x† to be equal to LB: within P…19† and, hence, LB is no feasible objec-
tive function value of P. Thus, LB is increased to
f …x† ˆ LB: …9† 20 and P…20† is constructed from P by adding the
The ®rst step consists of applying reduction tech- equation 3
x1 ‡ 2
x2 ˆ 20. As intervals of the
niques to the restricted problem P…LB† in order to variables we obtain x1 2 ‰2; 3:08Š; x2 2 ‰5:38; 7Š.
®nd additional constraints (cutting planes) or to Due to the integrality of the variables the upper
modify problem parameters so as to strengthen the bound on x1 and the lower bound on x2 can be set
problem data. Possibly, a contradiction occurs and to 3 and 6, respectively. Adding those boundaries
feasibility of P…LB† is precluded. Otherwise, in a of the variables to P…20† and solving the LP-re-
second step the restricted and strengthened prob- laxation yields the solution x ˆ …2; 7† with
lem is relaxed and solved, e.g. by applying a con- f …x † ˆ 20. This solution is integral and, therefore,
structive bound argument. If the relaxation has no optimal for P…20†. Since LB ˆ 20 is a lower bound
feasible solution, P…LB† is infeasible, too, and LB for problem P, the solution is optimal for P, too,
is no valid objective function value. If neither step
is able to exclude the possible feasibility of P…LB†
the process stops and LB serves as lower bound
value. (Sometimes, a feasible solution of the re-
laxation is even feasible for P and the process stops
with an optimum.) Otherwise, LB is increased by 1
and the two steps are repeated. The principle of
destructive improvement just outlined is illustrated
in Fig. 3.
An example problem P:
Minimize f …x† ˆ 3
x1 ‡ 2
x2 …I†
subject to 9
x1 ‡ x2 P 25; …II†
4
x1 ‡ 7
x2 P 50; …III†
x1 ; x2 P 0 and integer: …IV†
Traditionally, the LP-relaxation of P is built by
dropping the integrality constraints of the vari-
ables and solved by some LP-solver. The optimal
LP-solution of the example is x ˆ …2:12; 5:93†
with f …x † ˆ 18:22 (Fig. 4). Since the cost coe-
cients in the objective function are integral, LB
ˆ 19 is a ®rst lower bound on the optimal objec-
tive function value.
The destructive improvement method starts
with this value of LB and introduces the additional
constraint 3
x1 ‡ 2
x2 ˆ 19 to de®ne the re-
stricted problem P…19†. In order to strengthen
P(19), (sharper) lower and upper bounds on the
values of x1 and x2 are computed. This is achieved
by solving the LP-relaxation of P…19† with the
objectives of minimizing and maximizing x1 and
x2 , respectively. This results in the restrictions:
x1 2 ‰2:06; 2:53Š and x2 2 ‰5:69; 6:40Š. Fig. 3. Destructive improvement.
332 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
Fig. 4. Problems P and P(LB).
and the procedure stops. The additional con-
straints of P…19† and P…20† are shown in Fig. 4.
The bold parts of the lines indicate the feasible
regions of the LP-relaxations.
Remark 4. Whenever the objective function has a
large number of possible values one should prefer
another search method (e.g. binary search) than
successively considering values LB, LB + 1,. . .
Starting with an interval ‰LB; UBŠ of possible
values, the mean element M ˆ b…LB ‡ UB†=2c is
chosen and the restriction f …x† 2 ‰LB; MŠ is added
to build P…M†. If feasibility of P…M† can be
precluded, then LB is set to M ‡ 1. Otherwise,
UB is set to M. The search is repeated until LB ˆ
UB. If the objective function is real-valued, M
must not be rounded and LB is set to M instead of
M ‡ 1 in case of infeasible P…M†. The search stops
if the remaining interval is suciently small.
Remark 5. Sometimes, it is possible to utilize
information drawn from the reduced P…LB† or the
solution of its relaxation in order to increase LB by
more than 1. As an example consider the critical
sequence bound LB3 from Section 2 which may be
interpreted as some type of destructive improve-
ment method. It starts with a critical path and
restricts the schedule to the critical path length LB.
If it can identify another job which cannot be
processed within its time window (completely), the
lower bound can immediately be increased by
dj ÿ emax
j . The other bounds of Section 2 and 3 are
typical direct methods.
5. Destructive improvement for RCPSP
In the following, we describe how the destruc-
tive improvement technique can be adapted to
RCPSP. First of all, di€erent reduction techniques
are introduced. Secondly, modi®cations of direct
bound arguments which can bene®t from the re-
duction in problem data are presented.
5.1. Reduction techniques
Reduction by forward and backward pass: The
most intuitive reduction technique has already
been presented in Section 2. It consists of com-
puting earliest and latest starting and ®nishing
times by a forward and a backward pass using
LFn ˆ LB1 to start the backward pass. The re-
sulting time windows of jobs can be exploited by
other reduction techniques and adapted bound
arguments.
Reduction by subprojects: This technique is
based on identifying and evaluating subprojects of
the original RCPSP instance. A subproject SP…h; j†
is de®ned by a pair of jobs …h; j† with j being a
transitive successor of h and contains all jobs i
which are successor of h as well as predecessor of j.
Between h,j and the jobs of SP…h; j†, the original
precedence constraints are preserved. The jobs h
and j serve as dummy start and terminal nodes
(with duration 0) of the subproject, respectively. If
the optimal project completion time of SP…h; j† is
T  , the processing of job j starts at least T  periods
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346 333

after job h has been ®nished. Hence, T  or a lower considered. Then the following formulae have to
bound on this value de®nes a minimum time lag khj be used in the forward and the backward pass, the
between h and j. Whenever khj exceeds the length latter being started with LFn ˆ EFn :
of the critical paths of at least one subproject 

SP…h; j†, applying a forward and backward pass to ESj ˆ maxfEFn ‡ khj h 2 Pj g;
the overall project considering minimum time lags 
results in sharper time windows. Note that this 
may improve the bound by more than 1 as men-
tioned in Remark 5.
Minimum time lags may be derived by applying
any (computationally inexpensive) bound to a
subproject. Thus, the computational complexity of
this reduction technique depends on the complex-
ity of the bound arguments used and the number
of subprojects being of order O…n2 †.
Example: The pair (1,6) builds a subproject
containing the jobs 3 and 4. The nodes 1 and 6 are
the dummy start and terminal node, respectively.
Since 3 and 4 cannot be processed concurrently, a
lower bound on the completion time of SP…1; 6† is
6. Hence, due to LS6 ˆ 5, no feasible schedule can
exist for LB ˆ 16.
In general, any pair of jobs …h; j† with j being a
transitive successor of h excluding …1; n† forms a
subproject. But not all of these subprojects have to
be evaluated. Consider a subproject SP…h; j† with
job j having only one predecessor i. Since i does not
compete for resources with other jobs of SP…h; j†
and is a terminal job of a smaller subproject SP…h; i†,
the time lag between h and j can simply be computed
by khj ˆ khi ‡ di . Analogously, the time lag khj of a
subproject SP…h; j† with the start node having only a
single successor i is obtained by khj ˆ di ‡ kij .
Hence, only the subprojects SP…h; j† which have
start and terminal nodes with at least two successors
and two predecessors, respectively, have to be
evaluated. For all pairs of jobs …h; j† with j being a
direct successor of h, khj ˆ 0:
When computing earliest and latest starting and
®nishing times using minimum time lags, respec-
tively, the set of all (direct and indirect) predeces-
sors Pj and followers Fj of a job have to be
Table 3
Minimum time lags
SP(h,j) SP(1,6) SP(1,7) SP(1,11)
khj 6 8 15
LFj ˆ minfLSh ÿ kjh h 2 Fj g: …10†
If EFn > LB, a contradiction is present and LB is
increased to EFn .
Example: The following subprojects have to be
evaluated: SP…1; 6†; SP…1; 7†; SP…1; 11†; SP…3; 11†;
SP…3; 12†, and SP…6; 12†. The time lags obtained
for these subprojects by computing LB1 through
LB4 are given in Table 3. Since a subsequent for-
ward pass results in ES12 ˆ 19, LB can be in-
creased from 16…ˆ LB1† to 19.
Reduction by precedence: If the project com-
pletion time is restricted to LB some jobs must
precede others to which they are not related by
precedence. Following the logic of LB10, two test
projects are evaluated for each incompatible pair
of jobs h and j by computing lower bounds
LB…h; j† and LB…j; h† on the project durations.
Going beyond the capabilities of LB10, one of the
arcs, say …h; j†, can temporarily be ®xed whenever
LB…h; j†  LB < LB…j; h†. Such a problem reduc-
tion (which is independent of being able to in-
crease LB) is valid as long as LB < LB…j; h†. That
is, additional arcs can be ®xed using former re-
ductions which are still valid for the current LB. If
LB < LB…h; j†  LB…j; h† is true for some incom-
patible pair currently considered, a contradiction
occurs and LB can be increased. The new value is
set to LB…h; j† or the minimum project duration
for which any of the arcs ®xed earlier becomes
invalid, whatever is smaller. Note that thereby
bound increments larger than 1 are possible (cf.
Remark 5).
By considering such additional precedence re-
lations in the forward and the backward pass
sharper time windows for the jobs are obtained
SP(3,11) SP(3,12) SP(6,12)
9 13 9
334 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
which may be exploited by other reduction tech-
niques. Further precedence relations are added
considering incompatible triplets as in case of
LB11. Then, only such arcs …h; j† can be ®xed for
which any test project containing the reverse arc
…j; h† gets a bound exceeding LB.
Reduction by precedence is an iterative process
which is active as long as reductions are possible.
Initially, all incompatible pairs and triplets are
determined which takes O…mn3 † time. Always after
increasing LB or ®xing an arc, another iteration is
performed which has complexity O…n3 † due to
checking all (predetermined) pairs and triplets
again provided that LB1 is used to evaluate the
test projects.
Example: Examining the incompatible pair of
jobs 7 and 8 gives LB…7; 8† ˆ 19 and LB…8; 7† ˆ
20. Hence, the arc (7,8) can be ®xed as long as
LB ˆ 19 is true. The feasibility of LB ˆ 19 is
precluded by additionally considering the incom-
patible jobs 2 and 3 because of LB…2; 3† ˆ 21 and
LB…3; 2† ˆ 24. As a consequence, the overall
bound LB can be increased to 20 and the arc (7,8)
must be removed. Note that it is not possible to
increase LB to 21, because this value, obtained for
TP…2; 3†, was based on ®xing the arc (7,8), which is
no longer valid.
Reduction by core times: This reduction tech-
nique is based on the following idea: For a certain
LB, earliest and latest starting and ®nishing times
have been computed. Whenever the latest starting
time LSj of a job j is smaller than its earliest ®n-
ishing time EFj , job j must be active during
‰LSj ; EFj Š as long as LB is valid. This time interval
is called core time of a job.
The reduction is started with scheduling all jobs
(only) during their core times. If a resource con¯ict
occurs in any period, LB can be increased. Oth-
erwise, for each job we look for feasible time in-
tervals during which it can be processed
completely (in addition to the schedule built by the
core times of the other jobs). In case only one in-
terval is available for a job j, the time window
‰ESj ; LFj Š is restricted to this interval thereby also
restricting time windows of predecessors and suc-
cessors, respectively. This may result in new or
enlarged core times. If no interval exists, LB can be
increased.
Always after increasing LB or getting improved
core times, another iteration of the reduction
process is started. The time complexity O…mn2 † of
each iteration is due to searching possible time
intervals for each of n jobs. The search requires
checking O…n† changes in the resource pro®le,
which occur when core times start or end, and
observing m resource types.
Example: The Gantt chart in Fig. 5 shows each
job, starting as early (light grey beam) and as late
(dark grey beam) as possible (for LB ˆ LB1 ˆ 16).
The hatched bars are the core times. For example,
the core time of job 3, which lies on the critical
path, is equal to its complete duration whereas job
2 has a core time of only a single period and jobs 4
and 10 have none.
Fig. 6 contains capacity oriented Gantt charts
for core times. Jobs are represented by rectangles
with horizontal extents in length of their core times
and vertical extents uj1 . Starting with the critical
path length LB ˆ 16 (cf. Fig. 6(a)), we recognize
that in some periods the capacity requirements
exceed the availability (periods 3,9,10) and LB is
increased to 17.
For LB ˆ 17, the latest starting times are in-
creased by one reducing the core times (Fig. 6(b)).
Since there is still a resource con¯ict in period 10,
LB is increased again giving Fig. 6(c) without a
resource con¯ict caused by core times. Checking
for feasible time intervals yields that processing job
7 within its time window [6,14] completely before
or after job 8, which is incompatible to 7, is im-
possible (Fig. 6(c)). LB is increased to 19 resulting
in Fig. 6(d).
The only time interval during which job 7 can
now be processed is [6,10]. Hence its latest starting
time is set to LS7 ˆ 6. Due to this reduction, the
latest starting and ®nishing times of its predeces-
sors can be decreased, too. With LS2 ˆ 0 and
LS5 ˆ 3 the modi®ed chart in Fig. 7 is obtained.
Due to the core times of jobs 2 and 7, job 3 cannot
be processed completely. For the resulting
LB ˆ 20, no reduction is possible at all.
Applying di€erent reduction techniques: Usually,
not only one reduction technique will be applied.
Instead, it is more promising to use di€erent
techniques subsequently before trying to contra-
dict the feasibility of the reduced problem in-
R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346 335

Fig. 5. Gantt chart for LB ˆ 16.

Fig. 6. Reduction by core times.

336 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
Fig. 7. New core times for LB ˆ 19.
stance. Therefore, it is necessary to put the general
framework described in Section 4 (cf. Fig. 3) into
more concrete terms. The following steps are
performed, after determining an initial bound
value LB by direct methods: Using the current LB
as trial project duration, the reduction process is
started by a forward and a backward pass using
minimum time lags (see below). Afterwards, ad-
ditional precedence constraints are introduced and
core times are evaluated. This is continued until
no further reduction is possible or a contradiction
in the problem data occurs. In the ®rst case, direct
bound arguments are applied to the reduced in-
stance (see Section 5.2). If feasibility of LB can be
precluded, the bound value is increased and the
reduction process is restarted maintaining only
reductions which are still valid for the new LB.
Reduction by subprojects is computationally
more expensive than the other reduction concepts
(cf. Section 6.3). Therefore, this technique is ap-
plied only once before starting the destructive
improvement process to determine minimum time
lags between the jobs. All relevant subprojects are
determined and sorted according to non-decreas-
ing numbers of jobs contained. Considering them
in this order ensures that a subproject is not con-
sidered earlier than all the ones it includes. That is,
larger subprojects can use minimum time lags be-
tween their jobs obtained by evaluating smaller
subprojects. A minimum time lag for any sub-
project SP…h; j† is computed in the same manner as
the lower bound for the complete project. That is,
we start with applying direct bound arguments to
the RCPSP instance de®ned by SP…h; j† and per-
form the destructive improvement process as de-
scribed above.
5.2. Lower bound arguments for contradicting
feasibility
Within the destructive improvement approach,
lower bound arguments are used in order to con-
tradict the feasibility of a reduced problem when
this is not possible during the reduction phase.
Hence, not the value obtained is of interest but an
answer to the question, whether a feasible schedule
can exist or not. LB3; LB5, and LB8 through LB11
can be applied directly to the reduced problem,
pro®ting from the sharper time windows (heads
and tails), whereas LB2, LB4, LB6 and LB7 must
be strengthened in order to be successful in the
destructive improvement context.
LB2: Consider a time interval I ˆ ‰ts ; tt Š 
‰0; LBŠ and the set SI of jobs which have to be
performed completely or partially within I given
LB as maximal project duration. That is, SI con-
tains all jobs j with EFj > ts and LSj > tt which
are active within I for at least dj0 ˆ
minfEFj ÿ ts ; tt ÿ LSj ; dj g periods. Computing
LB2 for this interval reveals whether or not it is
not precluded to perform all jobs from SI within an
interval of length tt ÿ ts :
(& ' )
X
0 0
LB2 …SI † ˆ max ujr dj =ar jr ˆ 1; . . . ; m :
j2SI
…11†
0
If LB2 …SI † > tt ÿ ts , the current bound value LB is
contradicted and increased. In order not to ex-
amine all possible intervals, ts and tt are restricted
to the earliest starting and latest ®nishing times of
the jobs.
Example: With LB ˆ 16, we obtain the Gantt
chart in Fig. 5. Examining I ˆ ‰2; 12Š; SI contains
the jobs 5, 6, 7, 8 with their initial durations and
the jobs 2, 3 and 9 with d20 ˆ 1, d30 ˆ 3 and d90 ˆ 2.
Since d…3
1 ‡ 2
1 ‡ 4
2 ‡ 5
3‡ 1
2 ‡ 3
3‡ 2

1†=4e ˆ d41=4e ˆ 11 exceeds the length of I, no
feasible schedule can exist and LB is increased
to 17.
Node packing bounds LB4, LB6 and LB7:
Within the framework of destructive improve-
ment, the notion of incompatibility may be ex-
tended. Besides precedence and resource
incompatibility, two jobs are also incompatible to
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
each other if concurrent processing is impossible
due to their time windows. Hence, if the time
windows of a job j just added to set S and a job h
remaining in the list only overlap partially, the
duration of h is reduced by the maximal number of
periods the two jobs can be performed in parallel.
6. Computational results
We report on results of comprehensive numer-
ical experiments based on well-known standard
benchmark data sets. After comparing the e€ec-
tiveness of direct bounding procedures the ap-
proach of destructive improvement is examined
thoroughly by evaluating di€erent combinations
of reduction techniques and bound arguments. All
tests are performed on a Pentium PC with 166
MHz using the operating system Windows 95. The
bound arguments and the destructive improve-
ment procedures have been coded in C and com-
piled by means of Borland C‡‡ 5:0.
6.1. Data sets and complexity measures
The ®rst standard benchmark set (PATT) has
been collected from the literature by Patterson
(1984). Since all instances of this data set can be
solved very eciently by modern branch and
bound procedures, Kolisch et al. (1995) have de-
veloped a problem generator in order to create
more challenging instances. With this generator,
two new data sets (SMFF, SMCP) have been as-
sembled serving as reference sets in most of the
recent publications (e.g. Mingozzi et al., 1995;
Brucker et al., 1996; Demeulemeester and Her-
roelen, 1997).
Comprehensive computational experiments can
be found in the literature comparing and evaluat-
ing the e€ectiveness of exact as well as heuristic
procedures for solving RCPSP. They all show that
even though RCPSP is NP-hard, a large number of
instances considered can be solved very quickly,
whereas others remain computationally intractable
for a restricted amount of computation time.
Hence, di€erent complexity measures are proposed
trying to predict the complexity of an instance in
337
terms of computation time (Kolisch et al., 1995; de
Reyck and Herroelen, 1996a; Thomas and Salhi,
1997). In this paper the measures are used in order
to describe the data sets considered as well as ex-
amine the e€ectiveness of destructive improvement
more systematically. The following measures are
most popular. A detailed discussion can be found
in Kolisch et al. (1995).
· The network complexity NC is de®ned as the ra-
tio of nonredundant precedence relations to the
number of jobs.
· The resource factor RF equals the average num-
ber of resource types used by a job.
· The resource strength RS is determined for each
resource type r. It considers the per period avail-
ability ar , the maximum demand of a single job
umax
r ˆ maxfujr jj ˆ 2; . . . ; n ÿ 1g as well as the
peak demand upeak r which arises when all jobs
are started at their earliest starting times ob-
tained by a simple forward pass. These parame-
ters are related by computing RSr ˆ …ar ÿ
umax
r †=…upeak
r ÿ umax
r ). If ar < umax
r …RSr < 0† for
any resource type r, there obviously does not ex-
ist a feasible schedule whereas in case of
ar  upeak
r …RSr  1† for all resource types
r ˆ 1; . . . ; m an optimal solution can be ob-
tained by a simple forward pass.
In general, the following relationships between the
complexity measures and expected computation
times have been observed in the literature. A de-
creasing network complexity leads to longer com-
putation times, because more combinations of jobs
become feasible due to the decreasing number of
precedence relations. Considering the resource
measures, computation times tend to get longer
when the average number of jobs using a resource
type increases or when the availability of a re-
source type is scarce compared to its demand. This
is the case for an increasing resource factor and a
decreasing resource strength.
Table 4 shows the values of the main character-
istics and complexity measures of the data sets
considered. ``#inst.'' denotes the number of in-
stances contained in each set. Since PATT has been
collected from the literature, every instance has
di€erent values of the measures. Therefore, a range
of the values obtained is given in each column, with
£RS containing the average value of all resource
338 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346

Table 4
Characteristics of data sets
Data sets #inst. n m NC RF £RS
PATT 110 7±51 1±3 1.08±3.05 0.25±1 0.00±1.42
SMFF 480 (360) 32 4 1.5, 1.8, 2.1 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1 0.2, 0.5, 0.7, 1
SMCP 200 12, 22, 32, 42 1±6 1.5 0.5 0.1, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.8, 0.9

types. For three instances, RSr is larger than 1 for all
resource types and, hence the optimal objective
function value equals the length of the critical path.
Though the di€erent bound arguments as well as the
destructive improvement technique may not im-
prove on LB1 in this case, the instances have been
considered for the sake of completeness.
SMFF and SMCP have been generated by
Kolisch et al. (1995) using the measures as control
parameters for the generating process. For each
instance, RSr possesses the same value for all re-
source types. In case of SMFF, the values given for
NC, RF, and £RS have systematically been
combined resulting in 48 di€erent combinations.
For each of them, a group of ten instances has
been generated. Those 12 groups with an average
resource strength of 1.0 have been excluded from
the tests, because LB1 always yields the optimal
objective function value. That is, only 360 in-
stances of this set are considered.
6.2. Lower bounds
We examine the e€ectiveness of existing and
new bound arguments. They are compared with
respect to the following measures (UB is the op-
timal or best known objective function value):
· av.dev: average relative deviation of the bound
LBi from UB in % (relative deviation:
…UB ÿ LBi†=UB
100%)
· max.dev: maximum relative deviation of LBi
from UB in %
For PATT and SMFF the optimal solutions to all
instances are known. In case of SMCP, the best
known solutions are used. Computation times are
omitted, because they are negligible for all in-
stances.
Tables 5 and 6 show the results obtained for
existing and new bound arguments, respectively.
The procedures performing best for each set are
marked with an asterisk. LB5 has been computed
for all resource types and up to ®ve ``machines''.
For LB4, LB6, and LB7, di€erent sets S are ob-
tained by rotating the priority list as described for
LB4.
Comparing LB4 and LB6 reveals that the ex-
tension is very successful. LB5 is clearly outper-
formed by the arguments LB6 to LB9 which are
based on incompatible pairs and triplets and con-
sider all resources. This indicates that discarding
all but one resource is often a too strong relaxation

Table 5
E€ectiveness of existing lower bound arguments
Data set LB1 LB2 LB3 LB4 LB5 LBold
PATT
av.dev 13.53 24.17 10.73 11.32 10.62* 7.62
max.dev 51.56 57.89 43.75 36.00 32.81 28.00
SMFF
av.dev 12.28 38.50 8.87 8.19* 8.76 5.41
max.dev 54.72 68.85 45.28 36.21 32.22 26.09
SMCP
av.dev 9.22 39.92 6.31 6.00* 6.95 4.29
max.dev 50.67 64.00 40.00 27.50 36.36 26.58
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346 339

Table 6
E€ectiveness of the new lower bound arguments
Data set LB6 LB7 LB8 LB9 LB10 LB11 LBnew LB
PATT
av.dev. 7.43 5.89* 7.78 5.87* 11.16 8.63 3.74 3.74
max.dev. 24.00 25.00 28.00 25.00 43.75 39.06 13.04 13.04
SMFF
av.dev. 6.05 6.48 5.28* 7.00 9.69 8.98 4.05 4.05
max.dev. 26.98 23.88 34.33 25.86 49.60 44.34 19.74 19.74
SMCP
av.dev. 5.07 5.33 4.03* 5.83 7.21 6.34 3.43 3.43
max.dev. 26.58 35.38 27.85 32.31 44.00 40.00 26.58 26.58

for the data sets considered. This observation has
been con®rmed by adapting bounds for the related
bin packing problem, such as described in Scholl et
al. (1997), which also show large deviations. The
success of the procedures LB7 and LB9 shows that
the increase in the computational complexity,
caused by checking for triplets, pays o€. Com-
paring LB6, LB7 and their relatives LB8, LB9 in-
dicates that di€erent strategies should be applied
in order to ®nd incompatible subsets. Despite the
simplicity of their approaches, the precedence
based bound arguments LB10 and LB11 perform
nearly as good as the old bounds especially for
PATT.
Comparing the best bound values obtained by
existing and new procedures (columns LBold and
LBnew ) shows that the new bound arguments clearly
outperform the existing ones. For PATT the aver-
age as well as the maximum deviations are nearly
halved. The superiority is underlined by comparing
LBnew with the maximum LB of all bound argu-
ments. That is, the existing bound arguments can be
omitted without any loss in bound quality.
Remark 6. Partially, the superiority of the new
(and extended) bounds is caused by their con-
struction. For example, the bounds LB3, LB10
and LB11 start from computing LB1 such that
they dominate this basic bound. Furthermore, the
bound LB4 and its derivatives LB6 and LB8
dominate LB1 if the set S generated contains the
jobs of the critical path. Since LB6 directly extends
LB4 there is also a dominance relationship when
the same sorting criterion is used. Furthermore,
LB5 dominates LB2 as indicated in Remark 1.
Some of the bound arguments show a poor
performance considering the measures av.dev. and
max.dev. So, it has to be examined if their appli-
cation can be justi®ed at all. Table 7 shows the
quota of instances over all data sets, for which LBi
is one of the arguments yielding the maximum
bound value (denoted by % max). It reveals that
some of the bound arguments showing large de-
viations surprisingly obtain the best bound for a
large portion of the instances, in particular LB3,
LB10 and LB11. This indicates that they strongly
depend on the problem structure.
6.3. Destructive improvement
In the following, we examine the e€ectiveness of
the destructive improvement approach by com-
bining di€erent reduction techniques and bound-
ing procedures and applying them to the
benchmark sets. The combinations of the reduc-
tion techniques considered are given in Table 8.

Table 7
Quotas of maximum bound values
LBi LB1 LB2 LB3 LB4 LB5 LB6 LB7 LB8 LB9 LB10 LB11
% max 44.54 1.97 59.70 46.36 52.88 60.61 59.70 69.39 59.40 57.42 62.73
340 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346

Table 8
Combinations of reduction techniques
Reduction by RS RP RC RPC RSP RSC RSPC
Subprojects j j j j
Precedence relations j j j j
Core times j j j j

If reduction by subprojects is employed, the
lower bound arguments and the destructive im-
provement technique are applied to the initial
project as well as to all subprojects. Since the
computational e€ort per instance strongly depends
on the chosen combination, the average compu-
tation time (av.cpu) in seconds is introduced in
addition to the measures used above.
Pure reduction process: In order to compare the
potential of the di€erent reduction techniques,
they have been applied in the destructive im-
provement process without using any lower bound
arguments except for LB1. That is, only the re-
duction step is performed (cf. Fig. 3). The results
are given in Table 9. The combination RS has
been omitted from this test, because it does not
improve on LB1 until any other bound argument
or reduction technique is applied. The settings RP
and RC perform nearly identical concerning av.-
dev. whereas for max.dev. RP is slightly better
than RC but requires considerably larger compu-
tation times. Nevertheless, each technique yields
smaller values for av.dev. than the best existing
bounds except for SMFF. Combining them to
RPC leads to a further decrease of av.dev. This
combination already obtains better average devi-
ations than LB for SMCP though its computation
takes less time.
If subprojects are evaluated the bound quality
is greatly improved in particular for PATT and
SMFF. However, the average computation times
are increased, too. This is particularly true, if
subprojects as well as additional precedence rela-
tions are examined. Using all reduction techniques
clearly obtains the best results, indicating that they
complement each other well. RSPC outperforms
LB for all data sets concerning av.dev. In general,
the bound arguments lead to smaller maximum
deviations, because the large variety of approaches
is successful even for special structures of problem
instances.
Destructive improvement with all bound argu-
ments: In order to examine the full potential of the
destructive improvement technique, the same test is
repeated using all bounding procedures. The re-
duction process is started with the best bound value
LB . The results in Table 10 show that if only one
reduction technique is applied, RC is most suc-

Table 9
Destructive improvement without bound arguments
Data set LBold LB RP RC RPC RSP RSC RSPC
PATT
av.dev 7.62 3.74 6.37 6.21 5.70 4.06 3.94 3.16
max.dev 28.00 13.04 32.00 38.00 32.00 23.44 26.56 23.44
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.03 0.01 0.03 0.35 0.07 0.36
SMFF
av.dev 5.41 4.05 5.92 6.14 5.54 4.24 4.50 3.81
max.dev 26.09 19.74 32.80 33.71 32.80 29.35 31.25 29.35
av.cpu 0.01 0.09 0.05 0.01 0.05 0.25 0.07 0.27
SMCP
av.dev 4.29 3.43 3.67 3.71 3.24 2.82 2.90 2.39
max.dev 26.58 26.58 29.33 31.71 29.33 29.23 29.33 26.67
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.05 0.01 0.05 0.14 0.04 0.14
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346 341

cessful. It obtains the smallest values for av.dev
taking the shortest computation times. By the way
of contrast, RS takes much more computation time
but hardly improves on LB . If two reduction
techniques are combined, RPC is the fastest strat-
egy, though it obtains clearly worse results than
RSP and RSC. Evaluating subprojects by applying
all bound arguments and reduction techniques is
computationally rather expensive. Nevertheless,
the results for RSPC underline the power of de-
structive improvement. The values of av.dev are
nearly halved compared to those of LB .
Restricted application of bounds: In order to
reduce computation times, it seems to be appro-
priate to compute only a subset of the bounding
procedures within the destructive improvement
process. The subset which turned out to be most
successful in relation to computation times con-
tains the arguments LB2, LB8, and LB9. Table 11
shows that restricting the initial bound and the
reduction process to this subset reduces the com-
putation times to approximately one third. In
general, the rather small loss in bound quality is
more than compensated by the gain in speed. For
example, RPC can be computed as fast as LB but
yields much smaller average deviations, in partic-
ular for SMCP. The fastest combination RC still
clearly outperforms LB for all data sets.
In¯uence of problem complexity: Most of the
existing and new bound arguments are based on
the incompatibility of pairs or triplets of jobs. For
the data sets considered, the number of incom-
patible pairs and triplets strongly depends on the
average resource strength of an instance. For ex-
ample, the maximum number of incompatible
pairs of an SMFF instance with £RS ˆ 0:2 is 151,
whereas it is only 22 for £RS ˆ 0:7. Therefore, it
may be promising to select the bound arguments
and the reduction techniques used according to,
e.g., the resource strength of an instance. In order
to ®nd out which combination should be selected,
the instances of each data set have been divided
into three classes subject to their resource strength,
containing those instances with £RS 2 ‰0; 1=3†; £
RS 2 ‰1=3; 2=3†, and £RS P 2=3, respectively.
The results obtained as well as a more detailed
discussion can be found in the appendix. In gen-
eral, the following observations can be made. For
the ®rst class, the combination RPC together with
the bound arguments LB2, LB8 and LB9 repre-
sents the best compromise between bound quality
and computational e€ort. For the two other
classes the computation of lower bound arguments
should be omitted, completely. The combination
RSC clearly outperforms LB for those classes,
concerning the measures av.dev and av.cpu. For
the last class of PATT and SMCP, the lower
bounds computed by RSC are equal to the optimal
project durations for all instances.
The in¯uence of other measures of problem
complexity such as NC and RF on the perfor-
mance of bound arguments is much less signi®cant

Table 10
Destructive improvement with all bound arguments
Data set LBold LB RS RP RC RPC RSP RSC RSPC
PATT
av.dev 7.62 3.74 3.43 3.10 3.03 2.89 2.28 2.14 1.97
max.dev 28.00 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 1.19 0.18 0.16 0.18 2.85 2.56 2.85
SMFF
av.dev 5.41 4.05 3.99 3.25 3.06 2.88 2.64 2.48 2.25
max.dev 26.09 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74
av.cpu 0.01 0.09 0.67 0.22 0.18 0.22 1.63 1.44 1.64
SMCP
av.dev 4.29 3.43 3.43 2.09 1.90 1.67 1.74 1.57 1.33
max.dev 26.58 26.58 26.58 24.05 26.58 24.05 20.00 20.00 20.00
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.33 0.21 0.17 0.21 0.82 0.72 0.82
342 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346

Table 11
Destructive improvement with LB2, LB8, LB9
Data set LBold LB RS RP RC RPC RSP RSC RSPC
PATT
av.dev 7.62 3.74 4.51 3.31 3.19 3.00 2.38 2.21 2.08
max.dev 28.00 13.04 21.74 15.38 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.26 0.06 0.04 0.06 0.88 0.61 0.90
SMFF
av.dev 5.41 4.05 4.61 3.37 3.18 2.99 2.73 2.56 2.34
max.dev 26.09 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74
av.cpu 0.01 0.09 0.14 0.09 0.06 0.09 0.54 0.36 0.55
SMCP
av.dev 4.29 3.43 3.95 2.18 1.97 1.76 1.81 1.63 1.41
max.dev 26.58 26.58 27.85 26.58 27.85 26.58 20.00 20.00 20.00
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.08 0.09 0.06 0.10 0.29 0.20 0.30

than for £RS. Hence, it does not seem to be ap-
propriate to select reduction techniques and bound
arguments on the basis of those measures.
Comparison with LP-based bounds: Finally, we
compare destructive improvement with LP-based
bound arguments based on a reformulation of
RCPSP as presented by Mingozzi et al. (1995) and
Brucker et al. (1996). In both papers, the results
given indicate that the LP-based approach cleary
outperforms existing methods such as described in
Section 2. Table 12 shows the results for PATT
and SMFF obtained by Mingozzi et al. (1995), all
bound arguments and destructive improvement.
The results for SMCP have been omitted because
the optimal solutions are not available for all in-
stances. The values for SMFF refer to the subset
of instances evaluated by Mingozzi et al. (1995).
The indices for the di€erent destructive improve-
ment con®gurations represent the bound argu-
ments used.
Already RPC289 obtains better results than the
LP-based approach. Whereas the latter has proved
to be computationally too expensive within a
branch and bound procedure (cf. Mingozzi et al.,
1995), this con®guration of destructive improve-
ment can be evaluated in an average time of less
than 0.1 s. RSPC reduces the average deviation for
PATT and SMFF by more than 40% and 30%,
respectively.
7. Summary and conclusions
The ®rst part of the article (Sections 1±3) is
devoted to describing existing direct bound argu-
ments and presenting a number of new ones for the
resource-constrained project scheduling problem
(RCPSP). The new arguments advantageously
exploit special problem structures and relation-
ships to other combinatorial optimization prob-
lems such as machine scheduling. They allow
tackling a problem from di€erent directions in
order to obtain sharper bound values than being
possible by former bound arguments.

Table 12
Destructive improvement vs. LP-based approaches
Data set LP-based LB RPC289 RPCall RSPCall
PATT
av.dev 3.29 3.74 3.00 2.89 1.97
max.dev 14.60 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04
SMFF
av.dev 6.38 6.77 5.72 5.49 4.42
max.dev 23.71 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
In Section 4, we introduce a new meta-strategy
for computing lower bounds (on minimization
problems), which is called destructive improve-
ment. The basic idea of this approach is to prove
that no feasible solution for a trial bound value
can exist. In case of success, the trial value may be
increased and the process is repeated for a larger
value. Two steps are performed to furnish the
proof. Assuming that the objective function value
must not exceed the trial one, the problem data is
reduced. If this does not result in a contradiction,
modi®ed direct bounding procedures, taking ad-
vantage of the reduced data, are applied.
Section 5 describes how to apply the meta-
strategy to RCPSP. Di€erent techniques for re-
ducing the problem data are proposed. Further-
more, direct lower bound methods are adapted
such that they can successfully be used within the
destructive improvement framework.
Comprehensive numerical tests have been
performed on di€erent standard data sets (Sec-
tion 6). They show that the new bounding pro-
cedures clearly outperform the ones described in
the literature. The results obtained are further
improved by the destructive improvement tech-
nique. It turns out, that for some problem
classes, the direct bound arguments may even be
omitted completely, without a severe loss in
bound quality. Nevertheless, depending on the
reduction techniques applied, the destructive
improvement technique may consume a consid-
erable amount of computation time. This leads
to the following conclusions:
· Considering subprojects is the computationally
most expensive reduction technique. In order
to reduce the overall computational e€ort, heu-
ristic rules can be incorporated to determine
which subprojects should be evaluated.
· In case that the destructive improvement pro-
cess considerably improves on a lower bound
obtained by direct methods, a lot of trial bound
values have to be considered, if they are exam-
ined incrementally. Hence, more versatile search
procedures such as binary search should be ap-
plied.
· Within a branch and bound procedure, di€erent
con®gurations of destructive improvement may
be applied depending on the state of the enu-
343
meration process. In particular, the root node
should be tackled by the full power of destruc-
tive improvement. This e€ort can be compensat-
ed, if the branching process is able to take
advantage of the information gained during
the reduction process.
· In order to examine the potential of the destruc-
tive improvement technique as a meta-strategy
for calculating lower bounds, it has to be ap-
plied to other capacity constrained combinatori-
al optimization problems such as bin packing,
assembly line balancing and job shop scheduling
problems.
Acknowledgements
We want to thank Professor Dr. Andreas
Drexl, Dr. Rainer Kolisch, and Dr. Arno
Sprecher for providing us with the data sets.
Furthermore, we are grateful to two anonymous
referees which gave valuable suggestions for im-
proving the paper.
Appendix A
We examine the in¯uence of the resource
strength on the performance of the destructive
improvement technique. The instances of each
data set are subdivided into three classes C1,C2,
and C3 subject to their resource strengths. The
classes contain the instances with £RS 2 ‰0;
1=3†; £ RS 2 ‰1=3; 2=3†; and £RS P 2=3, re-
spectively. Among the combinations of reduction
techniques given in Table 8, RPC, RSC and RSPC
have been selected for examination. The ®rst two
represent the most promising compromise con-
cerning computation time and bound quality. The
last one is chosen, because it uses the full potential
of the destructive improvement technique. These
combinations are applied without any bound ar-
guments, together with LB2, LB8, and LB9 as well
as with all arguments.
The results obtained can be found in Table 13.
Combinations giving the best bound quality
are marked with `*', whereas `+' marks those
344 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346

Table 13
Results for di€erent resource strengths
Destructive improvement
Without arguments With LB2, LB8, LB9 With all arguments
old 
LB LB RPC RSC RSPC RPC RSC RSPC RPC RSC RSPC
PATT
C1
av.dev 5.02 1.77 13.96 11.65 7.50 1.21‡ * 1.77 1.21 1.21 1.77 1.21
max.dev 10.53 5.26 32.00 26.56 23.44 5.26 5.26 5.26 5.26 5.26 5.26
av.cpu 0.01 0.04 0.02 0.02 0.12 0.03 0.12 0.20 0.09 0.60 0.68
C2
av.dev 8.49 4.35 5.56 3.74 3.18‡ 3.48 2.59 2.47 3.35 2.49 2.34*
max.dev 28.00 13.04 21.88 15.62 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04 13.04
av.cpu 0.01 0.07 0.03 0.07 0.35 0.06 0.57 0.84 0.18 2.38 2.66
C3
av.dev 3.49 0.96 0.96‡ 0.00* 0.00 0.96 0.00 0.00 0.96 0.00 0.00
max.dev 25.00 12.50 12.50 0.00 0.00 12.50 0.00 0.00 12.50 0.00 0.00
av.cpu 0.01 0.12 0.03 0.11 0.60 0.09 1.24 1.75 0.28 5.13 5.62

SMFF
C1
av.dev 10.55 7.58 14.50 11.55 9.65 6.91‡ 5.75 5.22 6.59 5.53 4.95*
max.dev 26.09 19.74 32.80 31.52 29.35 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74 19.74
av.cpu 0.01 0.10 0.08 0.08 0.39 0.11 0.36 0.65 0.22 1.58 1.90

C2
av.dev 4.27 3.52 1.77‡ 1.60‡ 1.47* 1.71 1.60 1.47 1.68 1.60 1.47
max.dev 18.87 15.09 11.32 11.32 11.32 11.32 11.32 11.32 11.32 11.32 11.32
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.04 0.07 0.22 0.09 0.36 0.51 0.21 1.36 1.52
C3
av.dev 1.29 0.94 0.30‡ 0.28 0.27* 0.30 0.28 0.27 0.30 0.27 0.27
max.dev 10.91 9.09 5.45 5.45 5.45 5.45 5.45 5.45 5.45 5.45 5.45
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.03 0.07 0.19 0.08 0.36 0.48 0.20 1.38 1.51

SMCP
C1
av.dev 12.15 9.25 16.75 15.34 13.13 8.26 7.32‡ 6.77‡ 7.70 6.86 6.25*
max.dev 26.58 26.58 29.33 29.33 26.67 26.58 20.00 20.00 24.05 20.00 20.00
av.cpu 0.01 0.10 0.09 0.04 0.24 0.12 0.19 0.36 0.28 0.79 0.97
C2
av.dev 3.21 2.67 0.98 0.80 0.55‡ 0.69 0.72 0.52* 0.69 0.72 0.52
max.dev 23.53 20.59 21.82 8.82 8.82 8.82 8.82 8.82 8.82 8.82 8.82
av.cpu 0.01 0.07 0.05 0.04 0.13 0.09 0.20 0.29 0.20 0.70 0.79
C3
av.dev 0.56 0.43 0.00‡ * 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
max.dev 5.26 3.92 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
av.cpu 0.01 0.08 0.03 0.03 0.10 0.08 0.20 0.26 0.19 0.75 0.80
 R. Klein, A. Scholl / European Journal of Operational Research 112 (1999) 322±346
combinations which yield a good bound quality
with short computation times appearing to be
most favourable. In general, the results for the
Patterson data set are less expressive than for the
others, because it has not been generated system-
atically. For example, the maximum number of
jobs varies considerably in the di€erent classes.
Therefore, the following indications are mainly
based on the new data sets. For C1, RSPC com-
bined with all bound arguments must be applied to
obtain the best results. In order to avoid the high
computation times, reduction by subprojects as
well as the bound arguments except for LB2, LB8,
and LB9 should be omitted. Considering C2 and
C3, even those arguments can be excluded without
considerable loss in bound quality. It is remark-
able that pure RSC without any bound arguments
always outperforms LB for C2 and C3, though
requiring the shorter computation times.
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