The role of crossover in evolutionary approaches to Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling

Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling is an NP-hard problem very attractive for researchers due to its large area of applications. This paper concentrates on the evolutionary approaches to Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling based on permutation encoded individuals. A new recombination operator is proposed and a comparative analysis of several recombination operators is presented based on computational experiments for several project instances. Numerical results emphasize a good performance of the proposed crossover scheme which takes into account information from the global best individual besides the genetic material from parents.