Bottleneck Identification in Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling via Constraint Relaxation

Keywords: scheduling, RCPSP, bottlenecks, constraint relaxation Abstract: In realistic production scenarios, Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) tools often require manual intervention by production planners, as the system works with incomplete information, resulting in suboptimal schedules. Often, the preferable solution is not found just because of the too-restrictive constraints specifying the optimization problem, representing bottlenecks in the schedule. To provide computer-assisted support for decision-making, we aim to automatically identify bottlenecks in the given schedule while linking them to the particular constraints to be relaxed. In this work, we address the problem of reducing the tardiness of a particular project in an obtained schedule in the resource-constrained project scheduling problem by relaxing constraints related to identified bottlenecks. We develop two methods for this purpose. The second method identifies potential improvements in relaxed versions of the problem and proposes targeted relaxations. Surprisingly, the untargeted relaxations result in improvements comparable to the targeted relaxations. 1 INTRODUCTION In the modern manufacturing industry, Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) tools are used to schedule production automatically. However, not all parameters and information are available to the APS systems in practice.