A problem of finding an acceptable variant in generalized project networks.pdfVIP

A PROBLEM OF FINDING AN ACCEPTABLE VARIANT IN GENERALIZED PROJECT NETWORKS DAVID BLOKH, GREGORY GUTIN, AND ANDERS YEO Received 20 January 2003 and in revised form 20 June 2003 A project network often has some activities or groups of activities which can be per- formed at different stages of the project. Then, the problem of finding an optimal/accept- able time or/and optimal/acceptable order of such an activity or a group of activities arises. Such a problem emerges, in particular, in house-building management when the beginnings of some activities may vary in time or/and order. We consider a mathematical formulation of the problem, show its computational complexity, and describe an algo- rithm for solving the problem. 1. Introduction A project network may well has some activities which can be performed at different stages of the project. In such cases, we wish to compute an optimal (or, at least, acceptable) time or order of such an activity. Such problems appear, in particular, in house-building management when the beginnings of some activities may vary in time or/and order (see [1]), in scheduling of medical examinations in areas with difficult ecological situations [7, 9], and in building/city evacuation management [2, 10]. For other applications, see [3, 4, 6]. Consider a mathematical formulation of the problem. Let G = (N ,A) be a network, that is, finite acyclic digraph with unique source s. We will allow networks to have parallel arcs, that is, arcs with the same endvertices. The arc set A of G is partitioned into disjoint subsets D, Ai (i = 1,2,... , r): A = r=1Ai ∪ D. A set Ai is called an alternating set. An i r arc from i=1Ai is called an alternating arc. A variant G = (N ,A ) of G is a maximal subgraph of G satisfying the following conditions: s is a unique source of G, |A ∩A | = 1