A heuristic project scheduling approach for quick response to maritime disaster rescue

Maritime disaster can cause loss of human life and economy, as well as environment damage. Also the disaster rescue is difficult for the complexity of rescue process. Disaster rescue is emergent and urgent most of the time; therefore, quick response is rather important. The existing knowledge always supplies some strategies and generates a rescue plan by human expertise manual decision-making. The rescue plan obtained manually may be not a good one due to the lack of time available for human decision-makers to make decisions. To overcome limited time pressure, while retaining minimum rescue project duration, a rescue plan for the maritime disaster rescue is obtained with the application of heuristic resource-constrained project scheduling approach in this paper. Meanwhile a heuristic algorithm is proposed to generate the minimum project duration and the activities start times. To study its performance, 20 maritime rescue examples (21–50 activities) were tested. By comparing with those generated by the manual decision-making method, the results generated by heuristic algorithm indicate high efficiency. It also identifies the critical chain of the rescue project, which can help decision-makers control the rescue process efficiently.