allocation
The systematic distribution of a limited quantity resources over various time periods, products, operations, or investments.

resources The total means available to a company for increasing production or profit, including plant, labor, and raw material; assets.

Resource allocation is used to assign the available resources in an economic way. It is part of resource management

Introduction
A wide variety of engineering and business activities are structured as projects: they have tasks, they require resources of various types, and they are constrained in both time and budget. Many types of projects are also subject to considerable uncertainty – uncertainty in time to complete specific tasks, in the resource requirements of those tasks, and in whether or not the effort will produce an outcome judged to be “successful.” Programs often have many such projects, and the program managers face critical decisions about what projects to pursue, how much time and money to invest in each one, and how to reach decisions to terminate individual projects (or parts of projects) if they do not seem promising

Resource Types

Different types of resources are required to carry out a project. If we consider the development of a new microelectronic based product for example, we shall require people to carry out the design, equipment to test the design and materials to manufacture the prototypes.
We shall also need time and money which are, in a sense, fundamental resources.
We shall adopt the resource types used in Microsoft Project, which are: • people • equipment • materials
Both people and equipment are required to carry out work on the project and both have have costs associated with them. Materials are consumed as the project progresses and these also have costs associated with them.
People and equipment are given a "unit" value in MSP. For example, if a