May 15, 2026 · cs.AIJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Ido Lublin, Dor Atzmon, Izack Cohen
Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
We formulate the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as optimal search over the reachability graph of a Timed Transition Petri Net with Resources, using relative-delay tokens so that scheduling decisions correspond to transition firings in the induced state space. We solve the resulting problem with
A∗ guided by a heuristic that combines Critical Path and resource-based lower bounds, and prove that it is consistent under our token-based time semantics. Experiments on the PSPLIB benchmarks show that the approach outperforms strong exact Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MIP) baselines (SCIP, CBC) in both success rate and solve time. Per-instance analysis shows that heuristic search and MIP degrade along independent axes, resource tightness for
A∗ and formulation size for MIP, with resource strength mediating which solver benefits from scale.