Dynamic Planner: A Decision Support Tool for Resource Planning

摘要

Accurate resource planning is critical to a company's performance and profitability. This paper describes the motivation for and the realisation of an automated resource planning system (i.e. Dynamic Planner) within British Telecom. Dynamic Planner is a decision support tool to help resource managers decide how best to deploy their resources. It provides a feel for what resources are needed; how many are needed and how best they should be deployed. It also provides the framework to compare the impact of scenarios involving overtime, borrowed resources and skill move. Dynamic Planner is built atop iOpt, a Java-based optimisation toolkit for modelling and solving combinatorial problems using invariants (one-way constraints) and heuristic search methods respectively.