Proactive and reactive approach to employee competence configuration problem in planning and scheduling processes

Abstract

At the time of commonplace automation, robotization and the rapid development of IT, high qualifications of employees have become the critical element of every industry system. This follows from their limited availability, frequently high costs of procurement and possible employee absenteeism. Moreover, the concept of Industry 4.0 will transform current industry employees into knowledge employees. This is due to the fact that hard and routine tasks will be executed by robots and computers. This constitutes change in the required employee competences. Unfortunately, the aspect of management and configuration of employee competences is often overlooked in industrial practice. In response to the existing problem, the article puts forward the original model of employee competence configuration which is a basis for responses to numerous questions of managers of production processes, both general ones, e.g., Do we have a sufficient set of competences to execute a production schedule? as well as detailed ones, e.g., Which and how many competences are missing? etc. An important novelty of the presented model is the possibility of its application with both proactive and reactive questions. Due to the discrete and combinatorial nature of the problem under consideration, the use of mathematical programming methods was limited only to small data instances. Therefore, a proprietary dedicated genetic algorithm was proposed to solve this problem, which turned out to be extremely effective. The use of this genetic algorithm has enabled finding a solution depending on the instance data up to 70 times faster than by use of the mathematical programming.