Recource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem: Investigation of the Quality of Project Plans

This paper introduces the results whether humans are able to develop project plans with a high quality for the well-established Multi-criteria Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). To analyse this, an empirical study was conducted in which activities had to be serialized or parallelized in the plan, process steps had to be inserted or removed and durations as well as resource requirements had to be modified dynamically during planning. In contrast to this human based planning, a specific multicriteria evolutionary metaheuristic is presented that identifies human compatible plans to relatively large project management problems within a reasonable period of time. To evaluate the level of human competitiveness, a metric for measuring plan quality and the results of the empirical study are presented. The results derived from data of 100 participants and the metaheuristic show that only very few people were able to identify optimal solutions. Furthermore, humans are focusing on one target criteria when solving conflicting planning objectives.