A material flow based approach for scheduling dismantling projects

Bottlenecks in material flow handling onsite can impose a significant restriction on the schedule of large-scale projects. Thus, integrating material flows into scheduling models used in the planning process is of crucial importance. Nevertheless, for the particular case of dismantling projects, this integration has only been studied to a limited extent. Our contribution is an extension of the well-known resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) by constraints on material flows released during the execution of project activities. We use operations for representing the processing of materials and cumulative resources for representing storage facilities. Fulfilling an essential requirement for practical application, even complex and highly branched material flow networks comprising various storage facilities can be modeled. To efficiently generate starting solutions, we propose a schedule generation scheme tailored to such problems’ particular precedence structure. We study the schedule generation schemes’ performance on generated test instances and compare it to the constraint programming solver IBM ILOG CP Optimizer.