RESOURCE MANAGEMENT METHOD AND APPARATUS

The invention relates to resource management, and describes a method and apparatus to be used in planning of resource deployment. In an embodiment of the invention, the number and characteristics of forecasted and/or unprocess ed jobs falling within a time period such as a week, or a month, are compared t o resource availability and status for that time period, in terms of attribute s such as location, skills and time. A cost - in terms of jobs that cannot be carried out, given current resource availability and status - is evaluated. Preferably the attributes are stored as resource records, so that there is o ne resource record per resource, and the attributes of at least some of the resource records are modified using a heuristic search means or similar. The resource records are modified until a minimum cost is identified, and these resource records can then be used to formulate successive capacity plans, which can be input to a scheduling system.