Resource allocation problem under single resource assignment

Abstract

We consider a NP-hard resource allocation problem of allocating a set of resources to meet demands over a time period at the minimum cost. Each resource has a start time, finish time, availability and cost. The objective of the problem is to assign resources to meet the demands so that the overall cost is minimum. It is necessary that only one resource contributes to the demand of a slot. This constraint will be referred to as single resource assignment (SRA) constraint. We would refer to the problem as the S_RA problem. So far, only 16-approximation to this problem is known. In this paper, we propose an algorithm with approximation ratio of 12.