Proactive project scheduling using GPU-accelerated simulations under uncertainty environment

ABSTRACT

Numerous scheduling generation and revision methods have been developed for project scheduling under uncertain environments in previous research. However, most of these methods have yet to address a practical project with more than a hundred activities involving multiple decisions in scheduling generation and execution phases. This study proposes a local search-based scheduling method that comprehensively evaluates a baseline schedule considering decision-making in both the planning and execution phases. The proposed method performs simulations to evaluate schedule robustness accurately using GPU to find a locally optimal solution for large problem instances in a reasonable time. A series of numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can generate a robust schedule for large-scale project instances. These results conclude that the proposed method utilizing the simulation-based evaluation and the GPU acceleration is effective and provide insight into developing a scheduling method for practical projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Project scheduling
• uncertainty
• simulation-based evaluation
• GPU-accelerated computing

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported in part by Grant-in-Aid No. 19K15242 for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.