Integration of project scheduling and equipment planning

Equipment planning and project scheduling are important issues project managers face and are considered key factors in the success or failure of a project. Research carried out on project scheduling indicates that equipment planning is usually disregarded, or the project is first scheduled, and equipment is planned based on the schedule obtained. This leads to a non-optimal project schedule. In this article, project scheduling and equipment planning are simultaneously considered, where genetic algorithm and simulated annealing are utilized to solve the developed mixed-integer-programming model in order to minimize the costs. To examine the efficiency of the proposed algorithms, problems with different number of activities and equipment were solved and compared based on the results obtained. The results show that the proposed algorithms are capable of solving problems with high number of nodes and variable complexities in a short CPU time.