TREE-BASED METHODS FOR RESOURCE INVESTMENT AND RESOURCE LEVELLING PROBLEMS
- The execution of project activities generally requires the use of (renewable) resources like machines, equipment or manpower. The resource allocation problem consists in assigning time intervals to the execution of the project activities while taking into account temporal constraints between activities emanating from technological or organizational requirements and costs incurred by the resourceThe execution of project activities generally requires the use of (renewable) resources like machines, equipment or manpower. The resource allocation problem consists in assigning time intervals to the execution of the project activities while taking into account temporal constraints between activities emanating from technological or organizational requirements and costs incurred by the resource allocation. If the total procurement cost of the different renewable resources has to be minimized we speak of a resource investment problem. If the cost depends on the smoothness of the resource utilization over time the underlying problem is called a resource levelling problem. In this paper we consider a new tree-based enumeration method for solving resource investment and resource levelling problems exploiting some fundamental properties of spanning trees. The enumeration scheme is embedded in a branch-and-bound procedure using a workload-based lower bound and a depth first search. Preliminary computational results show that the proposed procedure is promising for instances with up to 30 activities.…
