A Resource Cost Aware Cumulative

We motivate and introduce an extension of the well-known cumulative constraint which deals with time and volume dependent cost of resources. Our research is primarily interested in scheduling problems under time and volume variable electricity costs, but the constraint equally applies to manpower scheduling when hourly rates differ over time and/or extra personnel incur higher hourly rates. We present a number of possible lower bounds on the cost, including a min-cost flow, different LP and MIP models, as well as greedy algorithms, and provide a theoretical and experimental comparison of the different methods.