Balancing workload in project assignment

Abstract

In this paper, we study a project assignment problem. Specifically, a set of projects, each of which needs to be finished over a project development cycle, are to be assigned to a group of identical engineers over a discrete planning horizon. The workload of the projects is different and fluctuates over their development cycles. In any period, an engineer has a maximum allowed workload. The objective of the problem is to assign the projects to engineers with the objective of balancing the total workload among the engineers; the load balance is measured by the difference between the maximum and the minimum total workload. Such a problem is new to the literature. The problem is strongly NP-hard. Therefore, we propose a two-stage heuristic approach to solve it. Extensive numerical experiments show that the proposed approach can achieve optimal or nearly optimal solutions for all test cases; such performance is much better than what can be obtained from an IP model solved with ILOG CPLEX11. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.