This paper considers two problem classes that are important to researchers as well as practitioners, namely packing and project scheduling problems. First, the two problem categories are described. This includes a classification of packing problems as well as of project scheduling concepts....

In project management, the project duration can often be compressed by accelerating some of its activities at an additional expense. This is the so-called time-cost tradeoff problem which has been extensively studied in the past. However, the discrete version of the problem which is of great...

For most computationally intractable problems there exists no heuristic that is equally effective on all instances. Rather, any given heuristic may do well on some instances but will do worse on others. Indeed, even the 'best' heuristics will be dominated by others on at least some subclasses of...

This paper introduces a new general framework for genetic algorithms to solve a broad range of optimization problems. When designing a genetic algorithm, there may be several alternatives for a component such as crossover, mutation or decoding procedure, and it may be difficult to determine the...

Numerous exact algorithms have been developed for solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. Experimental studies have shown that currently even projects with only 60 activities cannot be optimally solved within a reasonable amount of time. Therefore heuristics employing...

Resource-constrained project scheduling under a net present value objective attracts growing interest. Because this is an NP-hard problem, it is unlikely that optimum solutions can be computed for large instances. Thus, heuristics have become a popular research field. Up to now, however, tight...