A resource investment problem with time/resource trade-offs

In this study, we consider a Resource Investment Problem with time/resource trade‐offs in project networks. We assume that there is a single renewable resource and the processing requirement of an activity can be reduced by investing extra resources. Our aim is to minimize the maximum resource usage, hence, the total amount invested for the single resource, while meeting the pre‐specified deadline. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer linear model and find optimal solutions for small‐sized problem instances. For large‐sized problem instances, we propose a heuristic solution procedure. We develop several lower bounds and use them to evaluate the performance of our heuristic procedure. The results of our computational experiments have revealed the satisfactory behaviour of our optimality properties, lower bounds and heuristic procedure.