A bicriteria integer programming model for the hierarchical workforce scheduling problem

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a bicriteria integer programming model for hierarchical workforce scheduling in which the first criterion is the cost and the second is the suitability of task assignment to individual employees. The model is based on the integer programming formulation for the hierarchical workforce scheduling problem published in 2007 by Seçkiner et al., which extends the model proposed by Billionnet in 1999.Design/methodology/approachThe principal hypothesis of this paper is that, although an employee is capable of performing several different tasks with equal efficiency, the type of task to which he/she is assigned affects the overall suitability of the assignment configuration. Therefore, cost‐minimising solutions should also optimise task assignment when possible. This paper considers real cases and confirm that this approach to the problem is appropriate for dealing with common situations in personnel management.FindingsThe proposed idea is applied to the example problem used by Seçkiner et al. and the results are compared with Seçkiner et al.'s model results.Originality/valueConsequently, the proposal is more general and a more faithful representation of the problems faced by personnel managers, which should help to bridge the gap between academic studies and practical cases.

A case study of cost-efficient staffing under annualized hours

“…Next to annualized hours, literature considers the related concept of Working Time Accounts (WTAs), see [10,18,[21][22][23]. A Working Time Account holds a balance of the cumulative difference between an employee's contract hours and the hours worked.…”

Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art

“…When the skill class is undefined, such as in [15,49,55,66,76], the skill determinants are also undefined in the respective paper. However, in several cases, only the skill class is defined while the skill determinants are to be defined by the user [12,19,20,23,24,28,34,71,74,79,80,83,84,96,98,100,114].…”

“…Bard and Purnomo [10] incorporate this problem in their mathematical model to solve the preference scheduling problem for nurses with downgrading. Brucker et al [27], Burke et al [33] and Pastor and Corominas [96] also incorporate the preferences of the workers to work shifts that require their primary skills. Buchan and Dal Poz [30], Currie et al [46] and Branson et al [26] consider the problem of skill dilution and conclude that obtaining a cheaper skill mix with downgrading may be no more cost effective because of the various hidden costs.…”

Workforce Planning Incorporating Skills: State of the Art

“…Fortunately, the number of papers that do not define the skill class is very limited [15,49,55,66,76]. Table 1: Overview of the literature using hierarchical and categorical skill types Hierarchical task skills [1,2,3,9,10,11,12,16,17,19,21,22,23,24,25,27,28,29,32,33,36,38,42,44,51,52,56,57,58,64,65,67,68,69,70,78,79,80,83,84,85,86,87,91,92,…”