Investigating a claim about resource complexity measure

Abstract

The utilization factor (UF) measures the ratio of the total resources’ amount required to the availability of resources’ amount during the life cycle of a project. In 1982, in the journal of Management Science, Kurtulus and Davis claimed that “If two resource-constrained problems for each type of resource have the same UF’s value in each period of time, then each problem is subjected to the same amount of delay provided that the same sequencing rule is used (If different tie-breaking rules are used, a different schedule may be obtained)”. In this paper, with a counterexample, we show that the claim of authors cannot be justified.

Keywords

• scheduling scheme
• priority rule
• multi-project environment
• resource measure