Employee substitutability as a tool to improve the robustness in personnel scheduling

Abstract

Organisations usually construct personnel rosters under the assumption of a deterministic operating environment. In the short term, however, organisations operate in a stochastic environment as operational variability arises. This variability leads to the occurrence of unexpected events such as employee absenteeism and/or a demand for personnel that is higher or lower than expected. In order to deal with these uncertainties, organisations need to adopt proactive and reactive scheduling strategies to protect the personnel roster and to respond to this operational variability, respectively. In this paper, we discuss a proactive approach that exploits the concept of employee substitutability to improve the flexibility of a personnel shift roster to respond to schedule disruptions. We propose a pre-emptive programming approach to construct a medium-term personnel shift roster that maximises the employee substitutability value. Moreover, we assess different proactive strategies to introduce robustness with respect to the definition and formulation of employee substitutability and different reactive strategies that impact the decision freedom for schedule recovery. The robustness of the generated personnel shift rosters is evaluated using a three-step methodology of roster construction, daily simulation and optimisation, and evaluation.

Integrated employee scheduling with known employee demand, including breaks, overtime, and employee preferences

“…For Dahmen and Rekik (2015), ensuring personnel demand is met was more important than having more staff than needed so the authors put a higher cost on under-coverage while also allowing flexible break placement. Soukour, Devendeville, Lucet and Moukrim (2013), Kuo, Leung and Yano (2014), and Ingels and Maenhout (2017), on the other hand, only took account under-coverage in their models. This is similar with Bürgy, Michon-Lacaze and Desaulniers (2019) that penalizes under-coverage in the problem of employee scheduling that is particularly characterized by demand that has perturbations.…”

Untitled

“…Reserve agents are available for a short-term shift allocation, but this procedure is highly cost-intensive and therefore not applicable in every use case. Another proactive possibility is to consider staff substitutability during rostering and thus increase schedule flexibility [8]. In case of a shortage, rerostering is necessary to reassign vacant shifts to free agents.…”

“…In this paper, we are looking at the uncertainty of capacity, as service agents represent human resources and their presence cannot be taken for granted. There are several strategies to deal with such uncertainty, including: Substitutions of probably absent service agents, reserve shifts for reactive substitution or a general increase in staff demand in order to cover possible absences [3,[6][7][8][9][10]. Another more sophisticated option is using predictive analytics to estimate staff absences [3,9,11] and to adjust the roster accordingly.…”

Competence-oriented project team planning – university case study

“…Ionescu and Kliewer (2011) and Shebalov and Klabjan (2006) have focused on maximizing the number of crew swapping options for aircraft crew planning (Dück et al, 2012). Another solution to disruptions is the exchange of duties between employees, referred to as resource substitution (Ingels & Maenhout, 2017;Ionescu & Kliewer, 2011;Shebalov & Klabjan, 2006).…”