Open Access

Pok-Son Kim, Manfred Schmidt-Schauß

• We introduce a new method for representing and solving a general class of non-preemptive resource-constrained project scheduling problems. The new approach is to represent scheduling problems as de- scriptions (activity terms) in a language called RSV, which allows nested expressions using pll, seq, and xor. The activity-terms of RSV are similar to concepts in a description logic. The language RSV generalizes previous approaches to scheduling with variants insofar as it permits xor's not only of atomic activities but also of arbitrary activity terms. A specific semantics that assigns their set of active schedules to activity terms shows correctness of a calculus normalizing activity terms RSV similar to propositional DNF-computation. Based on RSV, this paper describes a diagram-based algorithm for the RSV-problem which uses a scan-line principle. The scan-line principle is used for determining and resolving the occurring resource conflicts and leads to a nonredundant generation of all active schedules and thus to a computation of the optimal schedule.