A Dynamic Planning Technique for Continuous Activities Under Multiple Resource Constraints

The solution technique developed in this paper integrates the simplex search algorithm into the recursive calculations of dynamic programming in order to mitigate the “curse-of-dimensionality.” Since differentiation is not required as a means of optimization procedure, it is expected that this technique will have an important impact on planning problems, such as the multiple resource allocation problems which involve nondifferentiable and/or highly nonlinear performance functions. Applications of the technique to very complex problems seem to confirm the anticipated polynomial average performance.