Implicit modelling for manpower scheduling with part-time workers

摘要

In labor-intensive industries such as services industry, utilization of precious manpower resources can make the difference in terms of profitability and meeting customer and/or project demands. Employing part-time workers on top of full-time workers is not uncommon in Singapore and the number of part-time workers is gradually increasing in the recent few years. From the modelling point of view, although set covering model proposed by Dantzig is able to incorporate part-time and full-time workers, the problem size can become very large, and this creates intractability. In this paper, an implicit manpower scheduling model with part-time workers is proposed. The implicit model is able to achieve optimal solution with a much reduced computation time as compared to the set-covering formulation, based on computational experiment on various distribution pattern of required staffing level with increasing complexity and problem size.