economics Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics anal ...

, resource allocation is the assignment of available

resource Resource refers to all the materials available in our environment which are technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and wants. Resources can broadly be classified upon thei ...

s to various uses. In the context of an entire economy, resources can be allocated by various means, such as

markets Market is a term used to describe concepts such as: *Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand *Market economy *Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market Geography *Märket, an ...

, or

planning Planning is the process of thinking regarding the activities required to achieve a desired goal. Planning is based on foresight, the fundamental capacity for mental time travel. The evolution of forethought, the capacity to think ahead, is c ...

. In

project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

, resource allocation or

resource management In organizational studies, resource management is the efficient and effective development of an organization's resources when they are needed. Such resources may include the financial resources, inventory, human skills, production resources, or ...

is the scheduling of activities and the resources required by those activities while taking into consideration both the resource availability and the project time.

Economics

, the field of

public finance Public finance is the study of the role of the government in the economy. It is the branch of economics that assesses the government revenue and government expenditure of the public authorities and the adjustment of one or the other to achiev ...

deals with three broad areas:

macroeconomic Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro-'' meaning "large" + ''economics'') is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, an ...

stabilization, the

distribution of income In economics, income distribution covers how a country's total GDP is distributed amongst its population. Economic theory and economic policy have long seen income and its distribution as a central concern. Unequal distribution of income causes ec ...

and wealth, and the allocation of resources. Much of the study of the allocation of resources is devoted to finding the conditions under which particular mechanisms of resource allocation lead to Pareto efficient outcomes, in which no party's situation can be improved without hurting that of another party.

Strategic planning

strategic planning Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to attain strategic goals. It may also extend to control mechanisms for guiding the implementation of the s ...

, resource allocation is a

plan A plan is typically any diagram or list of steps with details of timing and resources, used to achieve an objective to do something. It is commonly understood as a temporal set of intended actions through which one expects to achieve a goal. ...

for using available

resources Resource refers to all the materials available in our environment which are technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and wants. Resources can broadly be classified upon their av ...

, for example

human resources Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms includ ...

, especially in the near term, to achieve goals for the future. It is the process of allocating scarce resources among the various

project A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of even ...

s or business units. There are a number of approaches to solving resource allocation problems e.g. resources can be allocated using a manual approach, an algorithmic approach (see below), or a combination of both. There may be contingency mechanisms such as a priority ranking of items excluded from the plan, showing which items to fund if more resources should become available and a priority ranking of some items included in the plan, showing which items should be sacrificed if total funding must be reduced.

Algorithms

Resource allocation may be decided by using

computer programs A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer prog ...

applied to a specific domain to automatically and dynamically distribute resources to applicants. This is especially common in electronic devices dedicated to routing and communication. For example, channel allocation in

wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most ...

communication may be decided by a base transceiver station using an appropriate

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

. One class of resource whereby applicants bid for the best resource(s) according to their balance of "money", as in an online auction business model (see also

auction theory Auction theory is an applied branch of economics which deals with how bidders act in auction markets and researches how the features of auction markets incentivise predictable outcomes. Auction theory is a tool used to inform the design of real-w ...

). In one paper on

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...

time slice In computing, preemption is the act of temporarily interrupting an executing task, with the intention of resuming it at a later time. This interrupt is done by an external scheduler with no assistance or cooperation from the task. This preemp ...

allocation an auction algorithm is compared to proportional share scheduling.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Resource Allocation Resources Strategic management Schedule (project management) Economic planning Public finance Contexts for auctions

Economics

Strategic planning

Algorithms

See also

References