A genetic algorithm for resource investment problem with discounted cash flows

A resource investment problem with discounted cash flows is a project scheduling problem in which the availability levels of the resources are considered decision variables and the goal is to find a schedule and resource requirement levels such that the net present value of the project cash flows optimizes. In this paper, we present a genetic algorithm to solve this problem. We explain the elements of the algorithm such as chromosome structure, fitness function, crossover, mutation, and local improvement operations and solve more than 220 problems with known optimal solutions to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results of the experimentation are quite satisfactory.