Project scheduling with resource capacities and requests varying with time

This paper discusses an extension of the classical resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) in which the resource availability as well as the resource request of the activities may change from period to period. While the applicability of this extension should be obvious, we provide a case study in order to emphasize the need for the extension. A realworld medical research project is presented which has a structure that is typical for many other medical and pharmacological research projects that consist of experiments. Subsequently, we provide a mathematical model and analyze some properties of the extended problem setting. We also discuss how priority rule based heuristics for the RCPSP can be applied to the extended problem. In addition to the priority rules themeselves, we outline a framework for randomized priority rule methods. In order to provide a basis for experiments, we propose an adaptation of standard RCPSP test instances to the extended version of the problem. Finally we report the computational results of the priority rule methods.