Resource allocation

Last updated

In economics, resource allocation is the assignment of available resources to various uses. In the context of an entire economy, resources can be allocated by various means, such as markets, or planning.

Contents

In project management, resource allocation or resource management is the scheduling of activities and the resources required by those activities while taking into consideration both the resource availability and the project time. [1]

Economics

In economics, the field of public finance deals with three broad areas: microeconomic stabilization, the distribution of income and wealth, and the allocation of resources. Much of the study of the allocation of resources is devoted to finding the conditions under which particular mechanisms of resource allocation lead to Pareto efficient outcomes, in which no party's situation can be improved without hurting that of another party.

Strategic planning

In strategic planning, resource allocation is a plan for using available resources, for example human resources, especially in the near term, to achieve goals for the future. It is the process of allocating scarce resources among the various projects or business units. There are a number of approaches to solving resource allocation problems e.g. resources can be allocated using a manual approach, an algorithmic approach (see below), [2] or a combination of both. [3]

There may be contingency mechanisms such as a priority ranking of items excluded from the plan, showing which items to fund if more resources should become available and a priority ranking of some items included in the plan, showing which items should be sacrificed if total funding must be reduced. [4]

Algorithms

Resource allocation may be decided by using computer programs applied to a specific domain to automatically and dynamically distribute resources to applicants.

This is especially common in electronic devices dedicated to routing and communication. For example, channel allocation in wireless communication may be decided by a base transceiver station using an appropriate algorithm. [5]

One class of resource whereby applicants bid for the best resource(s) according to their balance of "money", as in an online auction business model (see also auction theory).

In one paper on CPU time slice allocation [6] an auction algorithm is compared to proportional share scheduling.

See also

Related Research Articles

Management science is a wide and interdisciplinary study of solving complex problems and making strategic decisions as it pertains to institutions, corporations, governments and other types of organizational entities. It is closely related to management, economics, business, engineering, management consulting, and other fields. It uses various scientific research-based principles, strategies, and analytical methods including mathematical modeling, statistics and numerical algorithms and aims to improve an organization's ability to enact rational and accurate management decisions by arriving at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex decision problems.

A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time computing applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which manages the sharing of system resources with a scheduler, data buffers, or fixed task prioritization in a multitasking or multiprogramming environment. Processing time requirements need to be fully understood and bound rather than just kept as a minimum. All processing must occur within the defined constraints. Real-time operating systems are event-driven and preemptive, meaning the OS can monitor the relevant priority of competing tasks, and make changes to the task priority. Event-driven systems switch between tasks based on their priorities, while time-sharing systems switch the task based on clock interrupts.

Project portfolio management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The objectives of PPM are to determine the optimal resource mix for delivery and to schedule activities to best achieve an organization’s operational and financial goals, while honouring constraints imposed by customers, strategic objectives, or external real-world factors. Standards for Portfolio Management include Project Management Institute's framework for project portfolio management, Management of Portfolios by Office of Government Commerce and the PfM² Portfolio Management Methodology by the PM² Foundation.

Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling and optimizing work and workloads in a production process or manufacturing process. Scheduling is used to allocate plant and machinery resources, plan human resources, plan production processes and purchase materials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spectrum management</span>

Spectrum management is the process of regulating the use of radio frequencies to promote efficient use and gain a net social benefit. The term radio spectrum typically refers to the full frequency range from 1 Hz to 3000 GHz that may be used for wireless communication. Increasing demand for services such as mobile telephones and many others has required changes in the philosophy of spectrum management. Demand for wireless broadband has soared due to technological innovation, such as 3G and 4G mobile services, and the rapid expansion of wireless internet services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Schedule</span> Planning of tasks and events

A schedule or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things are intended to take place. The process of creating a schedule — deciding how to order these tasks and how to commit resources between the variety of possible tasks — is called scheduling, and a person responsible for making a particular schedule may be called a scheduler. Making and following schedules is an ancient human activity.

Bandwidth allocation is the process of assigning radio frequencies to different applications. The radio spectrum is a finite resource, which means there is great need for an effective allocation process. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission or FCC has the responsibility of allocating discrete portions of the spectrum, or bands, to various industries. The FCC did this recently, when it shifted the location of television broadcasting on the spectrum in order to open up more space for mobile data. Different bands of spectrum are able to transmit more data than others, and some bands of the spectrum transmit a clearer signal than others. Bands that are particularly fast or that have long range are of critical importance for companies that intend to operate a business involving wireless communications.

In communication networks, multiplexing and the division of scarce resources, max-min fairness is said to be achieved by an allocation if and only if the allocation is feasible and an attempt to increase the allocation of any participant necessarily results in the decrease in the allocation of some other participant with an equal or smaller allocation.

In radio resource management for wireless and cellular networks, channel allocation schemes allocate bandwidth and communication channels to base stations, access points and terminal equipment. The objective is to achieve maximum system spectral efficiency in bit/s/Hz/site by means of frequency reuse, but still assure a certain grade of service by avoiding co-channel interference and adjacent channel interference among nearby cells or networks that share the bandwidth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Combinatorial auction</span>

A combinatorial auction is a type of smart market in which participants can place bids on combinations of discrete heterogeneous items, or “packages”, rather than individual items or continuous quantities. These packages can be also called lots and the whole auction a multi-lot auction. Combinatorial auctions are applicable when bidders have non-additive valuations on bundles of items, that is, they value combinations of items more or less than the sum of the valuations of individual elements of the combination.

Radio resource management (RRM) is the system level management of co-channel interference, radio resources, and other radio transmission characteristics in wireless communication systems, for example cellular networks, wireless local area networks, wireless sensor systems, and radio broadcasting networks. RRM involves strategies and algorithms for controlling parameters such as transmit power, user allocation, beamforming, data rates, handover criteria, modulation scheme, error coding scheme, etc. The objective is to utilize the limited radio-frequency spectrum resources and radio network infrastructure as efficiently as possible.

In project management, resource leveling is defined by A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge as "A technique in which start and finish dates are adjusted based on resource limitation with the goal of balancing demand for resources with the available supply." Resource leveling problem could be formulated as an optimization problem. The problem could be solved by different optimization algorithms such as exact algorithms or meta-heuristic methods.

Public budgeting is a field of public administration and a discipline in the academic study of public administration. Budgeting is characterized by its approaches, functions, formation, and type.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spider Project</span> Project management software

Spider Project is a project management software, developed by a company, called Spider Project Team.

Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes (A-CEEI) is a procedure for fair item assignment. It was developed by Eric Budish.

Various experiments have been made to evaluate various procedures for fair division, the problem of dividing resources among several people. These include case studies, computerized simulations, and lab experiments.

Truthful resource allocation is the problem of allocating resources among agents with different valuations over the resources, such that agents are incentivized to reveal their true valuations over the resources.

Course allocation is the problem of allocating seats in university courses among students. Many universities impose an upper bound on the number of students allowed to register to each course, in order to ensure that the teachers can give sufficient attention to each individual student. Since the demand for some courses is higher than the upper bound, a natural question is which students should be allowed to register to each course.

Online fair division is a class of fair division problems in which the resources, or the people to whom they should be allocated, or both, are not all available when the allocation decision is made. Some situations in which not all resources are available include:

In computer science and operations research, the envy minimization problem is the problem of allocating discrete items among agents with different valuations over the items, such that the amount of envy is as small as possible.

References

  1. "PMO and Project Management Dictionary". Pmhut.com. 2007-08-20. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
  2. "Production planning". Archived from the original on 7 Jun 2014. Retrieved 3 June 2014.
  3. Inteng "Planning manual and algorithm" Inteng Retrieved on 3 June 2014
  4. Samuel90 (2013-01-25). "Resource allocation". Slideshare.net. Retrieved 2014-06-24.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. "Wireless Channel Allocation Using An Auction Algorithm" (PDF). Retrieved 2014-06-24.
  6. "Tycoon: A Distributed Market-based Resource Allocation System". Citeulike.org. 2004-04-05. Retrieved 2014-06-24.