A new RCPSP variant for scheduling research activities in a nuclear laboratory

There are not many research works dedicated to the optimization of scheduling activities in research laboratories. In this paper, we consider the weekly scheduling problem of activities within a nuclear research laboratory. We show that this problem can be modeled as a preemptive multi-skill variant of the Resource-Constraint Project Scheduling Problem where the preemption of some activities is allowed and induces a penalty every time the activity is preempted. We propose two integer linear programs to find exact solutions. Computational tests are carried out and described.