A Comparison of Exact Approaches for Solving the Multiple Constrained Resource, Project Scheduling Problem

James H. Patterson
Additional contact information
James H. Patterson: University of Missouri--Columbia, Columbia, Missouri 65201, and Nijenrode, The Netherlands School of Business, Straatweg 25, 3621 BG Breukelen, The Netherlands

Management Science, 1984, vol. 30, issue 7, 854-867

Abstract: A recurring problem in managing project activity involves the allocation of scarce resources to the individual activities comprising the project Resource conflict resolution decisions must be made whenever the concurrent demand for resources by the competing activities of a project exceeds resource availability. When these resource conflict resolution decisions arise, project managers seek direction on which activities to schedule and which to delay in order that the resulting increase in project duration is the minimum that can be achieved with the given resource availabilities. The procedures examined in this paper are all designed to provide for this type of decision support. Each procedure examined is enumerative based, methodically searching the set of possible solutions in such a way that not all possibilities need be considered individually. The methods differ in the manner in which the tree representing partial schedules is generated and is saved, and differ in the methods which are used to identify and discard inferior partial schedules. Each procedure was found to be generally superior on a specific class of problems, and these classes are identified.

Keywords: project management: resource constraints; programming: integer algorithm; branch and bound; networks/graphs: applications (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1984
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (82)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.30.7.854 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:30:y:1984:i:7:p:854-867

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().