Resource Allocation by Means of Project Networks: Complexity Results

This article examines the complexity of resource-allocation decisions for resource-constrained project scheduling. The allocation decisions are modeled by means of precedence networks and are closely related to ES-policies, which are a type of scheduling policies introduced for stochastic scheduling. We find that even a number of 'surrogate' objective functions, whose use has recently been proposed by multiple sources, lead to hard problems. Our results confirm that resource allocation is difficult even when objective-function evaluation by itself is not intractable. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 58(1), 59-67 2011