The two most common categories of resources on CPM software are; renewable resources and consumable resources.
Renewable resources are renewed as soon as a particular activity using the resource ends. Only the total resource use at every time instant is constrained. Typical examples are manpower, machines, tools, and equipment.
Consumable resources (or non-renewable) are not renewed on an activity basis but consumed when used. Typical examples are money, raw materials and energy. Usually, the overall project costs are limited and pre-defined in a total contract price.
When I started looking for Consumable Resources /Materials I could not see the potential applications other than some way to manage inventory of materials. Unless you have issues with storage capacity then you might not feel the need to model your inventories within the CPM model.
But the potential need for consumable/material resource functionality is there for other scenarios that cannot be modeled without consumable resources functionality.
Recently I was confronted with the issue of modeling form-work sets and found that the use of materials functionality is a perfect fit for cases when you have a need to keep reserved the form-work from the first moment an activity from the group starts until the finish of all activities from that group. This is a different scenario to when form-work can be moved from activity to activity without the need to keep it reserved for a group of activities before it can be used by other activities or groups.
It also came to my mind it could be a perfect fit to control the start of an activity upon the start/finish of a certain number of activities within a group. The use of regular resources along with resource production can be an alternative.
About space as a resource it comes to my mind that similar to form-work it can be modeled using either renewable resources or consumable resources depending on the particular scenario.
I would like to share with you all potential applications we can think of for consumable/material resources and ask you to provide your comments and suggestions; some sample job files will also be welcomed.
My share: http://www.mediafire.com/?e0fr16edp8oklvl,gxbgdjzd6n6hq55 [1]
Best Regards,
Rafael