Modeling Human Resource Experience Evolution for Multiobjective Project Scheduling in Large Scale Software Projects

Abstract

The software project scheduling (SPS) is a project-scheduling problem where limited human resources are assigned to the tasks in multi-team project settings. Besides other dynamic events, employees experience evolution has direct influence in completing large-scale projects within budget and time. In this paper, a new SPS model is developed as a dynamic multi-objective optimization problem, which incorporates employees experience evolution with their learning ability over time. The experimental results on 24 problem instances (including six real-world instances) show that the developed SPS model reduces project duration by 40% while being within budget. The results provide evidence that consideration of experience evolution while tasks reallocation under dynamic events significantly optimizes project schedules. Moreover, the developed SPS model is evaluated with six state-of-the-art algorithms as bi-criterion evolution (BCE), NSGA-II, NSGA-III, Two_Arch2, OMOPSO, speed-constrained multi-objective particle swarm optimization (SMPSO) where BCE demonstrated distinct superiority for 63% data instances.

Keywords

• Software project scheduling
• experience
• metaheuristics
• multi-objective optimization