A two-stage skilled manpower planning model with demand uncertainty
International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics
ISSN: 1756-378X
Article publication date: 21 September 2018
Issue publication date: 8 October 2018
Abstract
Purpose
Human resources are one of the most important and effective elements for companies. In other words, employees are a competitive advantage. This issue is more vital in the supply chains and production systems, because of high need for manpower in the different specification. Therefore, manpower planning is an important, essential and complex task. The purpose of this paper is to present a manpower planning model for production departments. The authors consider workforce with individual and hierarchical skills with skill substitution in the planning. Assuming workforce demand as a factor of uncertainty, a two-stage stochastic model is proposed.
Design/methodology/approach
To solve the proposed mixed-integer model in the real-world cases and large-scale problems, a Benders’ decomposition algorithm is introduced. Some test instances are solved, with scenarios generated by Monte Carlo method. For some test instances, to find the number of suitable scenarios, the authors use the sample average approximation method and to generate scenarios, the authors use Latin hypercube sampling method.
Findings
The results show a reasonable performance in terms of both quality and solution time. Finally, the paper concludes with some analysis of the results and suggestions for further research.
Originality/value
Researchers have attracted to other uncertainty factors such as costs and products demand in the literature, and have little attention to workforce demand as an uncertainty factor. Furthermore, most of the time, researchers assume that there is no difference between the education level and skill, while they are not necessarily equivalent. Hence, this paper enters these elements into decision making.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the valuable comments and suggestions made by the respected reviewers. Their insightful comments and suggestions helped enhanced this paper.
Citation
Sadeghi-Dastaki, M. and Afrazeh, A. (2018), "A two-stage skilled manpower planning model with demand uncertainty", International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 526-551. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJICC-04-2018-0048
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited