Control of interrelated research and development projects

The purpose of this paper is to examine a type of resource allocation problem arising in the context of research and development activities. The particular problem analyzed involves scheduling a group of projects in such a way that total cost is minimized while several precedence relations are satisfied and specific completion times are maintained. The primary difficulty results from the existence of commonalities that allow the successful completion of a particular project to be applied to several different purposes. A solution approach is developed which combines a one-pass network algorithm to deal with the precedence and time restrictions and a dynamic programming procedure to allocate the resources to each project.