Personnel deployment planning

Personnel deployment planning

In many companies, labor is one of the biggest cost drivers, e.g. in the labor-intensive service sector. In order to be able to develop competitive advantages on the cost side, the efficient use of the resource labor is therefore of central importance in such companies. Due to increasingly deregulated working conditions, the problem of planning personnel deployment is becoming even more complex.

Staff scheduling deals with two central problems. For the individual days of a given planning period, a set of shifts must be found to cover the personnel requirements and subsequently shift sequence plans must be determined for individual employees. The usual objectives when determining shifts are to minimize the extra pay rates associated with a shift, for example, for late shifts or weekend work, while guaranteeing a certain level of service. Generating shift sequences generally involves maximizing individual employee preferences or fairly distributing unattractive shifts. Scheduling must take into account legal, collective bargaining, or contractual restrictions that affect, for example, shift lengths, break times, or the number and location of workdays and days off.

Problems of workforce scheduling are regularly characterized by a very large number of decision variables to be considered, for example, to describe possible shift patterns or shift sequence patterns. To solve such problems the method of column generation is often used, e.g. for crew scheduling in the aviation industry. In the context of column generation, only a constrained problem is initially considered, which includes only a subset of the possible shift order patterns. Additional shift order patterns (and associated decision variables) are generated only if their consideration leads to an improvement of the solution. In this way, such a problem can be solved in an iterative process, but without having to enumerate a priori all admissible shift order patterns.