CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT

LECTURE 14

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT - CONT’D

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SCHEDULING WITH LIMITED RESOURCE
 Shortage of resources is a major challenge.
 Often, the number of skilled labor is limited, related
equipment has to be returned as soon as possible.
 Scheduling under these resource constraints becomes a
complex problem, particularly when more than one resource is
limited.

 The technique that deals with limited resources has been

referred to as "resource scheduling“ or "resource-constrained
scheduling”.

 A resource conflict occurs when at any point in the schedule

several activities are in parallel and total amount of required
resource(s) exceeds the availability limit, for any of the
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resources required in these parallel activities.
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SCHEDULING WITH LIMITED RESOURCE
 The simple solution to that situation is that we can prioritizing
the parallel activities, given the resource to higher priority
activities and delay the others until the earliest time the
resource become available again.

 Notice that if we delay an activity at time period 3, to solve the

situation, we may end up with another resource conflict later
in time.

 Continuing with identifying next conflict points and resolving

them, determines the new schedule and the new project
duration.
 Accordingly, the objective in such situation is to delay some
activities so that the resource conflict is resolved and the
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project delay is minimized.
SCHEDULING WITH LIMITED RESOURCE
 Various models were developed in an attempt to answer this
question, and thus optimize resource-scheduling decisions.
 Early efforts used mathematical optimization, dynamic
programming, and linear programming.
 These models, however, were applicable only to very small size
problems.
 On the other hand, heuristic solutions for this problem have
been developed.
 Heuristic solutions use simple rules of thumb to provide
approximate but good solutions that are usable for large scale
problems.
 An example of these rules of thumb is that the resource can be
assigned to activity (ies) having smaller total float values than
others.
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SCHEDULING WITH LIMITED RESOURCE

Resource scheduling using least TF rule 6

SCHEDULING WITH LIMITED RESOURCE
 These heuristic rules are based mainly on activity
characteristics.
 The two most effective and commonly used heuristic rules are
the least total-float (LTF) and the earliest late-start
(ELS).
 These two rules have been proven to provide identical results,
with the ELS rule being advantageous over LTF rule.
 This is because the value of the late-start derived from the
original CPM calculations, unlike the total-float, need not to
be changed every time an activity is rescheduled due to
insufficient resource availability.
 As such, the ELS rule can be applied with much less
computational effort than the LTF rule.
 It starts from the project start time and goes through cycles of
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identifying eligible activities according to the network logic.
Resource scheduling
procedure using the
ELS rule

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ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM-1 (IN-CLASS)
 The activities of a project along with their durations, predecessors and
resource used are given in Table. If resource 1 is limited to 8 units and
resource 2 is limited to one unit, determine the activities schedule
start and finish times so that the weekly resource usage not exceed
the resource limits.

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SOLUTION TO PROBLEM-1 (IN-CLASS)
 The project network is drawn and the activities timings are calculated
giving a project completion time of 32 weeks without considering the
resource limits.

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SOLUTION TO
PROBLEM-1
(IN-CLASS)

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SOLUTION TO PROBLEM-1 (IN-CLASS)

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ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM-2 (AT HOME)
SUBMISSION IS DUE ON NEXT FRIDAY IN CLASS
 The activities involved in the construction of a small project
are given in Table. The resource usage for each activity is
shown in Table. Smooth the resource so that a preferred
resource usage is obtained. Solve this problem with the help
of PDM method.

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QUESTIONS?

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