The Anchor-Robust Project Scheduling Problem

In project scheduling, the durations of activities are often uncertain. Delays may cause a massive disorganization if a large number of activities must be rescheduled. In “The Anchor-Robust Project Scheduling Problem,” Bendotti, Chrétienne, Fouilhoux, and Pass-Lanneau propose a novel criterion for solution stability in project scheduling under processing times uncertainty. They define anchored jobs as jobs whose starting times can be guaranteed in a baseline schedule. Finding a project schedule with bounded makespan and a max-weight set of anchors is shown to be an NP-hard robust two-stage problem. Taking advantage of the combinatorial structure of project scheduling and budgeted uncertainty, the authors obtain a compact MIP formulation for the problem. Numerical results show that the obtained MIP outperforms standard techniques from the literature. They also showcase the practical interest of anchored jobs in project scheduling.