Proactive Operations Management: Staff Allocation with Competence Maintenance Constraints

Abstract

Highly qualified staff are the key to successful operations management in any organization. In this paper, the emphasis is put on the problem of planning the rotational assignment of work tasks to a multi-skilled staff to guarantee maintaining their competencies at the required level. The aim of this study is to propose a novel declarative model for proactive planning of staff allocation whilst taking into account the forgetting effect. Sufficient conditions are proposed that allow for the cyclical rotation of employees between different tasks in order to keep their competencies at a constant level. The numerical experiments prove that the presented approach allows for finding a trade-off between a robustness to absenteeism and maintaining staff competency levels. The proposed method is suitable for human resource-related decision making in an interactive mode.