An investigation into two approaches for resource allocation and scheduling

One source of complexity in tackling realistic scheduling problems comes from activities with resource alternatives. Such activities have a choice of resources to utilize. These resources may vary in their processing speed and the constraints upon them. The decision of which resource to use to process an activity can have a significant impact upon the quality of the schedule. A number of approaches for dealing with combined resource allocation and scheduling problems have been proposed. In this paper we present new techniques based on two of these approaches: complete decomposition prior to scheduling and multiple alternative decomposition scheduling. We investigate experimentally whether the higher computational cost of decision making and added complexity of using multiple alternative decompositions results in better scheduling performance than the complete decomposition prior to scheduling approach.