Resource allocation by means of project networks: Complexity results

Abstract

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. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 58(1), 59–67 2011