Multi-objective fuzzy modeling of project scheduling with limitations of multi-skilled resources able to change skill levels and interrupt activities

Abstract

Project scheduling is one of the most important and applicable concepts of project management. Many project-oriented companies and organizations apply variable cost reduction strategies in project implementation. Considering the current business environments, in addition to lowering their costs, many companies seek to prevent project delays. This paper presents a multi-objective fuzzy mathematical model for the problem of project scheduling with the limitation of multi-skilled resources able to change skills levels, optimizing project scheduling policy and skills recruitment. Given the multi objectivity of the model, the goal programming approach was used, and an equivalent single-objective model was obtained. Since the multi-skilled project scheduling is among the NP-Hard problems and the proposed problem is its extended state, so it is also an NP-Hard problem. Therefore, NSGA II and MOCS meta-heuristic algorithms were used to solve the large-sized model proposed using MATLAB software. The results show that the multi-objective genetic algorithm performs better than the multi-objective Cuckoo Search in the criteria of goal solution distance, spacing, and maximum performance enhancement.

Keywords

• project scheduling
• multi skilled resources
• goal programming
• multi-objective genetic algorithm
• multi-objective cuckoo search