On a multi-project staffing problem with heterogeneously skilled workers

Abstract

We examine a workforce assignment problem arising in the multi-project environment of companies. For a given set of workers and for a given set of projects, we want to find one team of workers for each project that is able to satisfy the project workload during each period of project execution. The aim is to minimize average team size. We outline two mixed integer linear programming (MIP) formulations and introduce two heuristic approaches to this problem. A numerical study indicates the performance of the approaches and provides managerial insights into flexibility issues.