functions for project scheduling with stochastic acti-
vity durations. For a special case involving only one
renewable resource (the budget) a two-stage integer
linear stochastic program has been proposed in Zhu
et al. (2007), whereas Bruni et al. (2011a), proposed
a chance-constrained based heuristic aiming at buil-
ding a baseline schedule which is protected against
possible disruptions.
Contrary to the stochastic project scheduling
(Bruni et al. 2015), robust project scheduling assumes
that the distribution of the uncertain activity duration
is not known or only partially known. Robustness can
be referred to either the project makespan (in this case
it is referred as quality-robustness) or to possible devi-
ations between the planned and realized starting times
of the projected schedule (we call this solution robus-
tness). The literature on robust project scheduling has
mainly dealt with the development of effective and
efficient proactive and reactive scheduling procedu-
res. Proactive scheduling aims at generating robust
baseline schedules, that incorporate some protection
against possible disruptions, whereas reactive schedu-
ling procedures can be invoked during the execution
of the project, to repair the baseline schedule by de-
viating as little as possible from the original baseline
schedule. For an extensive review of research in this
field, the reader is referred to Demeulemeester and
Herroelen (2011).
Robust optimization approaches have been re-
cently proposed for the RCPSP, under general poly-
hedral uncertainty (Bruni et al., 2017a,b). Assuming
that scenarios represent different realizations of the
activity durations, a min-max absolute-regret problem
is proposed by Artigues et al. (2011), to minimize the
maximum absolute difference between the makespan
obtained by the robust solution and the scenario de-
pendent optimal solutions.
In this paper, we study a stochastic programming
optimization approach for the RCPSP, assuming that
the random variables are discretely distributed. We
observe that such an assumption is quite general,
since discrete distributions arise either naturally in
many real-world applications, or as empirical approx-
imations of the continuous ones derived, for example,
by taking a Monte Carlo sample from a general distri-
bution.
The two-stage stochastic RCPSP (TSRCPSP) is
investigated by assuming that scenarios represent dif-
ferent realizations for the activity durations. The de-
cision variables are divided into wait-and-see varia-
bles, that must be determined before the realization
of the uncertain parameters, and here-and-now varia-
bles, that can adjust to the uncertain data when they
become known. The objective is to find a schedule
that minimizes the expected makespan over all sce-
narios. To solve the problem, we have designed and
implemented an integer L-shaped decomposition ap-
proach, both in the single cut and the multi-cut versi-
ons.
The remainder of the paper is organized as fol-
lows: in Section 2, a formal definition of the TSR-
CPSP is given. Section 3 presents a detailed descrip-
tion of the proposed exact algorithm. Section 4 dis-
cusses the computational results obtained on a set of
benchmark problems. Finally, some conclusions are
drawn in Section 5.
2 PROBLEM FORMULATION
Project activity duration is typically unknown when
scheduling decisions need to be taken; under uncer-
tainty, specialized models able to cope with this un-
certainty should be developed. Specifically, these
models should allow to make some decisions about
the schedule before the actual activities duration is
known. Then, after the uncertainty is disclosed, a
recourse action can be implemented to compensate
deficiencies in the previously made schedules. Sto-
chastic programming formulations extend and adapt
deterministic models to allow this kind of schedule
modifications. In these models, some decisions must
be made in the first-stage under uncertainty. Then, in
the second-stage, a recourse action can be made after
observing the actual values of the random variables.
In real cases, it is a very common practice to de-
cide upon the resource allocation well in advance,
since often resources (e.g. expert staff) cannot be ea-
sily transferred between activities at short notice, (for
instance in a multi-project environment), nor alloca-
ted without sufficient time lapse. In our model, we
assume that the resource allocation is a static here-
and-now decision, that can be made in advance, un-
der uncertainty about the actual duration of activities.
The starting times, on the contrary, can be decided la-
ter on.
Let define a project as a set of activities V =
{0, . . . , n +1} (where 0 and n +1 are two dummy acti-
vities representing the project start and end, respecti-
vely) that have to be scheduled. A set of renewable
resources K = {1, . . . , m}, each with finite capacity
R
k
for all k belonging to K is used during the project
execution. Precedence constraints between different
activities within the project are modeled by a set of
project arcs E such that (i, j) ∈ E means that activity
j has to start after the completion of activity i. Each
activity i ∈ V requires a non-negative amount r
ik
and
for the activities 0 and n + 1 r
0k
= r
n+1 k
= R
k
for all
A Two-stage Stochastic Programming Model for the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem under Uncertainty
195