Bi-level scheduling in high-end equipment R&D: when more algorithm strategies may not be better

Jun Pei, Haoxin Wang, Min Kong, Nenad Mladenovic, Panos M. Pardalos

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    5 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Motivated by the practical research and development (R&D) process in high-end equipment manufacturing, this study investigates a bi-level scheduling problem in a complex R&D project network, where each project contains multiple modules with a complete task network. In the bi-level scheduling problem, the upper-level problem is that the R&D project leader makes the decision on allocating all R&D project modules to limited R&D researchers and the objective is to minimise the total penalty cost of all projects, and the lower-level problem is that the researchers schedule and sort the assigned tasks to minimise their minimum makespan. The different capacity of researchers is considered, and some structural properties are derived based on the capacity analytics. To tackle this complex scheduling problem, an effective Variable Neighborhood Search algorithm based on the ‘less is more' concept is proposed, where a Multi-Greedy Heuristic is incorporated. Interestingly, we observe that simpler algorithmic strategies may lead to better algorithmic performance. Computational experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is efficient and stable.

    Original languageBritish English
    Pages (from-to)5436-5467
    Number of pages32
    JournalInternational Journal of Production Research
    Volume61
    Issue number16
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2023

    Keywords

    • Bi-level scheduling
    • less is more
    • project network
    • Variable Neighborhood Search

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