CAMP-GNN: A Constraint-Aware Message-Passing Model for Optimal Resource Allocation in Software Projects

Resource allocation in software projects is a critical challenge, with inefficiencies in handling dynamic constraints such as skill mismatches, evolving task dependencies, and budget overruns leading to widespread cost and schedule overruns. To address these issues, this paper introduces CAMP-GNN, a novel constraint-aware graph neural network (GNN) framework designed to optimize resource allocation in software projects, addressing challenges like skill mismatches, evolving task dependencies, and budget overruns. These issues often lead to significant cost and schedule overruns, and CAMP-GNN aims to resolve them by dynamically adapting to project constraints. The framework integrates urgency, skill alignment, and budget slack directly into its message-passing layers, allowing for more precise and context-aware task-resource assignments. A key contribution is SoftStat, the first structured dataset that combines resource pools, allocations, and project details, enabling the modeling of complex task-resource dependencies and financial/temporal constraints. CAMP-GNN also introduces domain-specific message aggregation rules to unify urgency, skill alignment, and budget slack, advancing GNNs beyond basic relational modeling. A novel preprocessing pipeline is proposed to convert raw project timelines, skill dependencies, and budget thresholds into machine-learnable features, ensuring effective integration with computational models. Validated on both synthetic and real-world datasets, CAMP-GNN demonstrates superior performance with a 0.12 MAE, RMSE of 0.18 in allocation, F1 of 0.89 in budget violations, and 085 in deadline violations, 18% cost savings, and a 27% reduction in deadline breaches, outperforming existing methods. Future work will focus on scaling the framework for large-scale projects and improving interpretability for broader adoption.