Project resources leveling using software agents

Different approaches to project planning and scheduling have been developed. The Operational Research (OR) approach provides two major planning techniques: CPM and PERT. Artificial Intelligence (AI) initially promoted the automatic planner concept. In order to plan a project, the automatic application of predefined operators is required. However, most domains are not so easily formalized in the form of predefined planning operators. The paper focus is on the agent-based approach to project planning and scheduling, especially in Resource Leveling issues. The authors have developed and implemented the ResourceLeveler system, an agent-based model for leveling project resources. The objective of Resource Leveler is to find a scheduling of resources similar to the optimal theoretical solution which takes into consideration all constraints stemming from the relationships between projects, activity calendars, resource calendars, resource allotment to the activities and resource availability. ResourceLeveler was developed in C# as a plug-in for Microsoft Project.