A Simultaneous Project Scheduling and Resource Binding Method Based on the Load-Capacity Model

To evaluate the feasibility of a new software development project in a situation in which two or more projects are being implemented concurrently, it is necessary to consider not only software development workload but also residual capacity of the organization. Therefore, the authors proposed the Load-Capacity Model for verifying feasibility at an early stage of the software development project. This paper presents a simultaneous project scheduling and resource binding method based on the Load-Capacity Model. This method is formulated as Integer Linear Programming, using Load-graph and Capacity-graph, which represent workload and organization capacity respectively, as inputs. Outputs of this method are Gantt Charts and Load-Capacity Diagrams. The load-capacity diagram shows the state of the organization after workloads have been assigned. Experimental results on realistic problem examples show that the method provided solutions in a practical time period.