The specifics of carrying out research and development work (R&D), dictated by the requirements of legislation and standardization documents, impose a number of increased requirements on a potential contractor. The head of the organization, considering the possibility of performing R&D, makes a decision by analyzing the requirements of the terms of reference, the resources available to the organization and possible limitations. The article presents an approach to the formation of methodological support for assessing the possibility of implementing the requirements of the technical assignment for R&D within the time limits set by the contract, taking into account the resources available to the potential contractor and the level of qualification of personnel. To calculate the criteria, a modification of the PERT model is given and algorithms for analyzing the relevance of texts based on cosine similarity are applied. The proposed methodological apparatus can be used to create a model of a problem-oriented decision support system in preparation for R&D.