Abstract: At present, the project of R & D enterprises is in multi-project environment. In order to solve the human resource contention in multi-project management, this kind of enterprise is studied for optimizing the human resource scheduling in the multi-project management. The minimum total cost is taken as the objective function by taking the delay penalty cost into consideration, and the real problem is modelled. An algorithm which is "hyper-heuristic" based on ant colony optimization is used to solve the problem. The algorithm divides the problem into two parts, project activity allocation and selection, and it uses ant colony optimization as high-level heuristic strategy to search low level heuristic rules, then generates feasible solutions according to the rules. Multiple sets of simulation experiments are designed to compare this algorithm with the combination of heuristic rules. the experimental results show that the algorithm performs a better search performance overall, and it provides a new solution to the scheduling problem for human resources.

Key words: ant colony optimization, hyper-heuristic algorithm, human resource scheduling