Resource portfolio problem under resource dedication policies in multi-project environments

Abstract

Resource related decisions are one of the important aspects of multi-project environments, since the resource based considerations define the environment as a multi-project problem by coupling projects with corresponding conceptual and physical constraints. The characterization of the way resources are used by the individual projects in a multi-project environment is named as resource management policy in this dissertation. Resource management policies can differ with respect to the environment characteristics (e.g., geographical distribution of projects, specific resource characteristics, etc.). Thus, to identify and characterize different properties and aspects of the multi-project environment, different resource management policies need to be defined. Two different resource management policies are proposed in this dissertation. The first one is the Resource Dedication (RD) policy where resources cannot be shared among projects because of the characteristics of the multi-project environment. The second policy is an extension of RD, such that renewable resource transfers among projects are allowed when one of the projects finishes before the start of the another one. This resource management policy is called the Relaxed Resource Dedication (RRD) policy. These different resource management policies are investigated in a problem environment such that general resource capacities are included into the problem as another decision level. This problem is called Resource Portfolio Problem. The main contributions of this dissertation are the definitions for RPP under different resource management policies, corresponding mathematical models and the proposed solution approaches for multi-project scheduling problems.