A New Decision Support System for Optimal Integrated Project Scheduling and Resource Planning

Two scheduling practices are commonly used depending on the availability of resources. When resources are not expensive, activities are scheduled and then resources are allocated until the available resources are exhausted. Then, iterative adjustments are applied to the resource allocation plan and the activities sequence to reach a feasible solution. Conversely, when expensive resources are involved, a resource allocation plan based on the economics of the resource is established and then activities are scheduled accordingly. However, Resource Constrained Scheduling Problems (RCSP) are not solved efficiently with either of these approaches. To find the optimal solution, activity scheduling and resource allocation should be formulated as an integrated optimization problem. Such models become numerically cumbersome for practical size problems and difficult to solve. In this article, a novel mathematical formulation and an efficient solution algorithm are proposed for solving RCSPs. Then, this framework is used for solving a practical problem in the context of the construction industry.