Author:

Abstract:

The planning of the workforce in a company is one of the most important problems managers face as labor is very expensive, especially in highly developed countries. It is also one of the most difficult problems to solve as it entails some special features that are absent in all other types of resource allocation problems. When people are involved, the decision environment tends to get very dynamic. In order to fully grasp the problem, one must take into account different employee preferences, labor union constraints, different skills that workers may possess and even the impact that certain decisions may have on the behavior of the employees. As the size of the company increases, this problem tends to get more difficult too. Hence, in order to stay competitive, an efficient personnel planning is indispensable such that demand is met with minimal labor costs and employees stay motivated at the same time. The main idea of this thesis is that applicable solutions to the personnel planning problem can only be obtained by adding realistic assumptions and features. We therefore investigate how elements such as uncertainty, skills, training and even vehicle routing can be integrated with the personnel staffing (i.e., deciding which and how many workers to hire) and scheduling (i.e., deciding when the workers should work and which tasks they should perform) problem. However, taking into account these realistic assumptions highly increases the complexity of the problem. In this thesis we show how our proposed solution techniques can be used to efficiently solve these problems by testing them on real-life situations.