This paper deals with the problem of project scheduling subject to multiple execution modes with non-renewable resources, and a model that handles some of monetary issues in real world applications.The objective is to...This paper deals with the problem of project scheduling subject to multiple execution modes with non-renewable resources, and a model that handles some of monetary issues in real world applications.The objective is to schedule the activities to maximize the expected net present value(NPV) of the project, taking into account the activity costs, the activity durations, and the cash flows generated by successfully completing an activity.Owing to the combinatorial nature of this problem, the current study develops a hybrid of branch-and-bound procedure and memetic algorithm to enhance both mode assignment and activity scheduling.Modifications for the makespan minimization problem have been made through a set of benchmark problem instances.Algorithmic performance is rated on the maximization of the project NPV and computational results show that the two-phase hybrid metaheuristic performs competitively for all instances of different problem sizes.展开更多
Traditional expert-designed branching rules in branch-and-bound(B&B) are static, often failing to adapt to diverse and evolving problem instances. Crafting these rules is labor-intensive, and may not scale well wi...Traditional expert-designed branching rules in branch-and-bound(B&B) are static, often failing to adapt to diverse and evolving problem instances. Crafting these rules is labor-intensive, and may not scale well with complex problems.Given the frequent need to solve varied combinatorial optimization problems, leveraging statistical learning to auto-tune B&B algorithms for specific problem classes becomes attractive. This paper proposes a graph pointer network model to learn the branch rules. Graph features, global features and historical features are designated to represent the solver state. The graph neural network processes graph features, while the pointer mechanism assimilates the global and historical features to finally determine the variable on which to branch. The model is trained to imitate the expert strong branching rule by a tailored top-k Kullback-Leibler divergence loss function. Experiments on a series of benchmark problems demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the widely used expert-designed branching rules. It also outperforms state-of-the-art machine-learning-based branch-and-bound methods in terms of solving speed and search tree size on all the test instances. In addition, the model can generalize to unseen instances and scale to larger instances.展开更多
文摘This paper deals with the problem of project scheduling subject to multiple execution modes with non-renewable resources, and a model that handles some of monetary issues in real world applications.The objective is to schedule the activities to maximize the expected net present value(NPV) of the project, taking into account the activity costs, the activity durations, and the cash flows generated by successfully completing an activity.Owing to the combinatorial nature of this problem, the current study develops a hybrid of branch-and-bound procedure and memetic algorithm to enhance both mode assignment and activity scheduling.Modifications for the makespan minimization problem have been made through a set of benchmark problem instances.Algorithmic performance is rated on the maximization of the project NPV and computational results show that the two-phase hybrid metaheuristic performs competitively for all instances of different problem sizes.
基金supported by the Open Project of Xiangjiang Laboratory (22XJ02003)Scientific Project of the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)(ZK21-07, 23-ZZCX-JDZ-28)+1 种基金the National Science Fund for Outstanding Young Scholars (62122093)the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72071205)。
文摘Traditional expert-designed branching rules in branch-and-bound(B&B) are static, often failing to adapt to diverse and evolving problem instances. Crafting these rules is labor-intensive, and may not scale well with complex problems.Given the frequent need to solve varied combinatorial optimization problems, leveraging statistical learning to auto-tune B&B algorithms for specific problem classes becomes attractive. This paper proposes a graph pointer network model to learn the branch rules. Graph features, global features and historical features are designated to represent the solver state. The graph neural network processes graph features, while the pointer mechanism assimilates the global and historical features to finally determine the variable on which to branch. The model is trained to imitate the expert strong branching rule by a tailored top-k Kullback-Leibler divergence loss function. Experiments on a series of benchmark problems demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the widely used expert-designed branching rules. It also outperforms state-of-the-art machine-learning-based branch-and-bound methods in terms of solving speed and search tree size on all the test instances. In addition, the model can generalize to unseen instances and scale to larger instances.
