Hello all,

I'm trying to put a preliminary programme for a project, which:

• Is at a remote location, therefore the work crew will require accommodation on site, which is provided by the client. The crew will be working a 3:1 roster, i.e. 3 weeks on, 1 week off. We will be penalised for acoomodation which are requested by not used.
• Is small in size, and I only need one crew for each trade. The construciton period is long enough that works requiring a particular trade will be on hold whilst the crew goes on R&R. However this project requires a lot of different trades.
• There are enough work fronts open that trade continuity is not a problem.
• There's no specific start & finish dates for this project. They will be advised by the client at a later stage.

I'm having problem demonstrating this on the problem. I've come across the following options but none of them does exactly what I want the programme to do.

1. Block of a week every 3 weeks in the resource calendar. The problem with that is because the start date is unknown, which days do I block off? I'd like the crew to do a full swing of 3 weeks before going on R&R, so when they have off is totally dependent on when they start working. Further more, each time something's changed in the problem, either duration of an activity or activity relationship for the start of the crew, I have to redo the calendars for each trade, and I'd much rather not go there if I can avoid it, although it looks like I don't have any other options available.  
2. extend the activity duration by 1/3, so that a 6 day activity will become 8 days, and keep the resource allocation the same. Whilst overtime, the total duration is close to what it is, it doesn't show R&R break in the histogram. It also result in an inaccurate manning histogram, which makes requesting accommodation from the client a bit tricky.
3. extend the activity duration by 1/3, and increase resource level accordingly. I can just tell the client that the manning histgram represents total man employed, not total manning on site, but then I'll still have to come up with a separate accommodation request.

Is there a different way that magically solves all my problem? Does primavera have a funciton that automatically calculates which days to block-off on the calendar which I'm not aware off? (this is easy enough to write a funciton to calculate easily on Excel but is there a way to import it over to primavera)?

If you were in my positon what would you do?

Thank you.