An examination of resourcing policies for the multi-resource problem

Effective management of resources in a dynamic, multiproject environment requires consideration of two key issues: the availability of each of the multiple resources and the method of scheduling these resources to complete activities and, subsequently, projects. This paper identifies the trade-offs between performance and the availability of multiple resources, when some resources ar more costly than others. It finds that there are significant effects when the level of either the costly resources or the cheaper resources are varied, that trade-offs can be made by reducing the availability of the costly resources and increasing the availability of the cheaper resources and that the improvement in completion time performance is reasonably linear over the tested ranges and the rates of improvement differ over the ranges. The paper describes the resource allocation factors and treatments as well as the scheduling heuristics. It uses a finite scheduling algorithm along with the prioritization heuristics to schedule the constrained multiple resources simultaneously and a simulation to replicate the environment. The paper develops linear regression to provide further insight.