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IIMB Management Review

Document Type

Article

Abstract

In a project, accomplishment of an activity implies use of resources, possibly more than one type. Ifthe resources are available in unlimited quantity then the project completion time is mainly dependent upon the precedence relationship among the project activities, However, when resources are restricted during each time period of the project, sequencing decisions regarding scheduling of activities have to be taken. This is because of several activities simultaneously competing for the same kind of resource. Therefore, it is necessary to devise certain scheduling rules in order to resolve the conflicts among activities. In such a situation, before arriving at a final solution, a large number of possible solutions have to be examined. The problem of resource allocation and scheduling in project networks under various assumptions has been studied and reported extensively (Gopalan etal 1977). One important conclusion that can be drawn from this selected literature survey is that very little research has been carried out on resource constrained scheduling under uncertainty. However, taking into consideration the uncertainty in activity durations, researchers have developed heuristics/mathematical models for speeding up of activities, so that the project is completed within the specified time with minimum cost,on the assumption that there are mo limitations on resource availability. In a resource-constrained scheduling problem with probabilistic activity durations, there are two important considerations. (i) How can the extra resources demanded beyond the resourceconstrained period be minimised ?and (ii) How to assign priority for competing jobs ?

Publication Date

7-1-1987

First Page

163

Last Page

192

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