Limited-resource allocation in construction projects

The limited-resource allocation problem arises in many construction projects when there are different limitations on the amount of resources available to the contractor. The scheduling objective is to hold project duration to a minimum while resolving the resource conflict by shifting the activities until the resource requirements do not exceed the amount of resource available. The objective is to minimize project duration using the resources available and increase the utilization of equipment and labor force available. Numerous computer packages have been developed for limited-resource management. Some of these packages assign priorities to the project activities based on measures obtained from the critical path calculations. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the major difference between the approach taken by the commercial computer packages and some of the priority ranking procedures developed in some of the heuristic techniques.