Linear-programming-based heuristics for project capacity planning

Many multi-project organizations are capacity driven, which means that their operations are constrained by various scarce resources. An important planning aspect in a capacity driven multi-project organization is capacity planning. By capacity planning, we mean the problem of matching demand for resources and availability of resources for the medium term. Capacity planning is a very useful method to support important tactical decisions such as due date quotation and price quotation for new projects, and to gain an insight into capacity requirements for the medium term. We present a capacity planning model in which aspects such as capacity flexibility, precedence relations between work packages, and maximum work content per period can be taken into account. For this model, we discuss several linear-programming-based heuristics. Using a large set of test instances, we compare these heuristics with some results from the literature. It turns out that some of these heuristics are very powerful for solving capacity planning problems