Can We Make the Projects Easier? (Part 2)

In the ongoing quest to make projects more easily solvable for the well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem, this chapter introduces a new procedure that modifies projects in various ways to enhance their solvability. These modifications remove portions of the project without removing the optimal solution of the original project. Through the use of three theorems, a novel transformation procedure, and a powerful supercomputer, an intensive experiment demonstrates the feasibility of simplifying challenging projects. This reduction in complexity is proven both theoretically and experimentally, resulting in novel solutions previously not found in the literature. This chapter is based on the article “Reducing the feasible solution space of resource-constrained project instances,” published in Computers and Operations Research.