Swarm Intelligence in the Optimization of Software Development Project Schedule

The Software Development Project Scheduling Problem is similar to the well-known Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Scheduling Problem (RCMPSP). It consists in determining a schedule of tasks taking into consideration resource availabilities and precedence constraints, while optimizing an objective. Like RCMPSP, it is an NP-hard problem. In this paper, a task segmentation scheme to schedule a software development project is proposed and the average duration of the multiple concurrent projects is minimized using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) meta-heuristic. PSO is a recent meta-heuristic algorithm, known for its simplicity in programming and its rapid convergence. A series of experiments show optimum results for several software development schedule scenarios.