Project Scheduling as a Disjunctive Temporal Problem

The main result of the paper is the reduction of the RCPSP/max problem to a Disjunctive Temporal Problem that allows customization of specific properties within a backtracking search procedure for makespan optimization. In addition, a branching strategy is proposed able to deduce new constraints which explicitly represent infeasible or useless search paths. A new variable ordering heuristic (called clustering) is also used which provides a further boosting to the algorithm's effectiveness.