A tabu Search Approach for Scheduling Problem under Labour Constraints

The Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPS) is a well known difficult combinatorial optimization problem. Many exact and heuristic approaches for this problem have been reported in the literature. Tabu search is a meta-heuristic designed to guide local search methods to escape the trap of local optimality. It has been lagerly used for solving combinatorial problems. In this report we propose a tabu search approach for Scheduling Problem under Labour Constraints (SPLC). Different neighbourhood strategies are discussed and then implemented. Computational experiments on a 25-instance SPLC data set are reported. The results obtained for benchmark instances are compared with those produced by a Constraint Logic Programming algorithm and show that our approach is at least as good as the best heuristics reported in the literature.

1997