An Efficient Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a widely used metaheuristic optimisation algorithm due to its simplicity, adaptability, and efficiency. However, it has a notable drawback of limited local search capability for combinatorial optimisation problems such as the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). This study employs a line search method to strengthen the local search process, focusing on refining candidate solutions in a given direction. Furthermore, Constraint Programming is embedded to deal with the large number of constraints in RCPSP and explore the complex and discrete solution space efficiently. The computational results on 1560 instances from the well-known library PSPLIB with 30, 60, and 120 tasks, indicate that the proposed algorithm yields superior outcomes compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.