ON A PAPER BY CHRISTOFIDES ET-AL FOR SOLVING THE MULTIPLE-RESOURCE CONSTRAINED, SINGLE PROJECT SCHEDULING PROBLEM

In a recently published article in EJOR, Christofides et al. (CAT) present a depth-first search, branch-and-bound solution procedure for the multiple-resource constrained, single project scheduling problem. While there are many important contributions in this paper, we show by counterexample that if the branching strategy described by the authors is used, the optimal solution might not result. Computational experience on a set of test problems appearing in the open literature is reported both with the original branching strategy suggested by the authors and a modified branching strategy that we propose. The modified strategy guarantees the determination of the optimal solution in all instances of the problem at the expense of an increase in node evaluations and average CPU time. Computational results using the revised procedure and a hybrid, breadth-first search procedure also investigated by CAT are reported.