Competence allocation planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism

Abstract

In order to deal with unexpected events such as employee absenteeism and/or a demand for personnel that is higher or lower than expected, organizations need to adopt proactive and reactive scheduling strategies to protect the personnel roster and to respond to this operational variability, respectively. In this paper, we discuss a proactive approach that exploits the concept of employee substitutability to improve the flexibility of a personnel shift roster to respond to schedule disruptions. With a view to developing a DSS-driven method dedicated to competence allocation planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism, we present the concept of the so-called robust employee competence structure. A declarative model of the concept allows to find an employee competence structure robust to a given set of disruptions while guaranteeing an admissible personnel allocation to the assumed set of tasks. Since the problem of designing such a robust structure is NP-hard, another goal of the present study is to propose a sufficient condition the fulfilment of which will guarantee the validity of calculations. Potential applications of the proposed solution are discussed using examples.