Important classes of reactions for the proactive and reactive resource constrained project scheduling problem
The proactive and reactive resource constrained project scheduling problem (PR RCPSP) that has been introduced recently (Davari and Demeulemeester, 2017) deals with activity duration uncertainty in a very unique way. The optimal solution to an instance of the PR RCPSP is a proactive and reactive policy (PR policy) that is a combination of a baseline schedule and a set of required transitions (reactions) In this research, we introduce two interesting classes of reactions, namely the class of selection based reactions and the class of buffer based reactions, the latter in fact being a subset of the class of selection based reactions. We also discuss the theoretical relevance of these two classes of reactions. We run some computational results and report the contributions of the selection based reactions and the buffer based reactions in the optimal solution. The results suggest that although both selection based reactions and buffer based reactions contribute largely in the construction of the optimal PR policy, the contribution of the buffer based reactions is of much greater importance. These results also indicate that the contributions of non selection based reactions (reactions that are not selection based) and selection but not buffer based reactions (selection based reactions that are not buffer based) are very limited.
Ann. Oper. Res.