A SIMPLE CONTINUOUS-TIME PROCESS SCHEDULING FORMULATION AND A NOVEL SOLUTION ALGORITHM

We present a simple, yet general mathematical programming formulation for optimal scheduling of processes represented as Resource-Task Netwo rks. The formulation is based on a continuous representation of time a nd leads to a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. In comm on with other continuous-time scheduling formulations, this exhibits a large integrality gap that renders its solution using standard branch -and-bound algorithms highly problematic. A novel branch-and-bound alg orithm that branches on both discrete and continuous variables is prop osed to address this complication.