A Priority Rule-Based Heuristic for Resource Investment Project Scheduling Problem with Discounted Cash Flows and Tardiness Penalties.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mathematical Problems in Engineering Volume 2009, Article ID 106425, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2009/106425 Research Article A Priority Rule-Based Heuristic for Resource Investment Project Scheduling Problem with Discounted Cash Flows and Tardiness Penalties Amir Abbas Najafi1 and Fatemeh Azimi2 1 Department of Industrial Engineering, Qazvin Islamic Azad University, Nokhbegan Avenue, 34185-1416 Qazvin, Iran 2 Department of Mathematics, Qazvin Islamic Azad University, Nokhbegan Avenue, 34185-1416 Qazvin, Iran Correspondence should be addressed to Amir Abbas Najafi, aa najafi@ Received 4 November 2008; Revised 15 April 2009; Accepted 11 May 2009 Recommended by Wei-Chiang Hong Resource investment problem with discounted cash flows RIPDCFs is a class of project scheduling problem. In RIPDCF, the availability levels of the resources are considered decision variables, and the goal is to find a schedule such that the net present value of the project cash flows optimizes. In this paper, we consider a new RIPDCF in which tardiness of project is permitted with defined penalty. We mathematically formulated the problem and developed a heuristic method to solve it. The results of the performance analysis of the proposed method show an effective solution approach to the problem. Copyright q 2009 A. A. Najafi and F. Azimi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. Introduction Project scheduling is a major objective of most models, and methods propose to aid planning and management of projects. Project scheduling problems are combination of precedence