A tabu search procedure for developing robust predictive project schedules

Proactive scheduling aims at the generation of robust baseline schedules that are as much as possible protected against disruptions that may occur during project execution. In this paper, we focus on disruptions caused by stochastic resource availabilities and aim at generating stable baseline schedules. A schedule's robustness (stability) is measured by the weighted deviation between the planned and the actually realized activity starting times during project execution. We present a tabu search procedure that operates on a surrogate, free slack-based objective function. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by extensive computational results obtained on a set of randomly generated test instances.