Moving Activities from Discrete to Unary Resources

A discrete resource of capacity n is often used in Scheduler to represent a set of n equivalent resources of capacity 1. For example, a team of n people with the same capabilities is represented by a discrete resource of capacity n.

One question you might ask is how to transform a schedule which satisfies the capacity constraint (that is, a schedule which guarantees that at any point in time, the number of resource units required by activities does not exceed n) into a schedule which specifies precisely which unary resource will contribute to the execution of which activity. For example, how can we transform the schedule of a group of n people, considered globally as a discrete resource of capacity n, into a schedule of n unary resources, each of which represents a specific person?

In this chapter, we see that a very simple algorithm is available for changing activities from discrete resources to unary resources.