Scheduling with Discrete Resources: the Ship-loading Problem

This chapter presents an example in which activities require a discrete resource of capacity strictly greater than 1. In this context, two activities which require the same resource may overlap in time, but the total capacity required at time t must not exceed the capacity available at time t. The problem is solved by assigning precise start and end times to each activity in the schedule. The propagation of resource constraints is exploited to prune the search tree and to guarantee that the available capacity is never exceeded.