Serial and parallel resource-constrained project scheduling methods revisited: Theory and computation

We consider the so-called parallel and serial scheduling method for the classical resource-constrained project scheduling problem. Theoretical results on the class of schedules generated by each method an provided. Furthermore, an in-depth computational study is undertaken to investigate the relationship of single-pass scheduling and sampling for both methods. It is shown that the performance-ranking of priority rules does not differ for single-pass scheduling and sampling, that sampling improves the performance of single-pass scheduling significantly, and that the parallel method cannot be generally considered as superior.