Introducing CuSPLIB

A couple of colleagues and I are doing research on single-machine cumulative scheduling problems (CuSP). As part of this effort, we’ll have to create some benchmark instances on which to test our algorithms. Some time ago, I searched around for problem instances and could not find any. People seem to be more interested in the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP), of which the CuSP is a special case/subproblem. One of the experts in the area told me that he was unaware of any standard CuSP benchmarks and that difficult instances were hard to generate. Therefore, I decided to make our instances public, hoping that (i) this could be helpful/useful to someone else out there, and (ii) this could attract more attention to this problem. As a result, CuSPLIB is born! It includes a few pieces of code (instance generator, MIP and CP models), an initial set of 10 instances, and some discussion about integer programming models for the problem. I intend to talk about other (alternative) models and include some references in the near future. The preliminary computational results are interesting and make me believe that it’s not that difficult to find challenging instances. Let me know what you think, and feel free to contribute to CuSPLIB! I’ll be updating it little by little as our research progresses.