A bi-objective hierarchical program scheduling problem and its solution based on NSGA-III

In enterprise project management systems, a program at the tactical level coordinates and manages multiple projects at the operational level. There are close relationships between multiple projects in a program, which are typically manifested as shared resources and precedence relationships. Most research efforts have concentrated on the resource sharing by projects, while the precedence relationships between projects have yet to be comprehensively investigated. In this paper, a bi-objective hierarchical resource-constrained program scheduling problem proposed, where both resource sharing and precedence relationships between projects are considered in a distributed environment. The problem contains two different sub-problems at the operational level and the tactical level, and they are modeled in the same way as two bi-objective multi-mode scheduling problems. Shared resources are allocated from the tactical level to the operational level, and once they are allocated to a project, they can only be re-allocated to other projects once the current project is finished. Subsequently, a two-phase algorithm based on NSGA-III is developed. The algorithm runs at the operational level and the tactical level in turn. According to the Pareto fronts of projects that are submitted from the operational level, the bi-objective program planning at the tactical level is conducted under the constraints of precedence relationships and shared resources. The results of computational simulations demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the improved algorithm. By coordinating the local optimization of projects and the global optimization of the program in a hierarchical framework, the method proposed in this paper provides an effective integrated scheduling method for decision-makers at various levels of a program.