Allocation of partially renewable resources: Concept, capabilities, and applications

Enterprises face mounting pressures to reduce costs and to better use exist ing staff or equipment. At least in part, these pressures can be met by mor e efficient and intelligent planning; methods for this task lie at the hear t of management science and operations research. Successful application of such methods depends on unambiguous model formulations. They, in turn, call for expressive modeling concepts that allow one to capture a wide range of requirements appearing in real-world problems. Throughout the last decade, one particularly successful modeling concept in this regard has been the o ne of scarce resources. We generalize the classical resource concepts of no nrenewable and renewable resources to partially renewable ones. In addition to a very general class of resource limitations, partially renewable resou rces allow one to formulate a variety of logical relations between scheduli ng decisions. This paper demonstrates different ways to make use of these c apabilities, in terms of model formulations as well as of practical applica tions. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.