Improving the dispersion of surplus labor in personnel scheduling solutions

Linear programming-based heuristics for personnel tour scheduling have focused primarily upon the minimization of the workforce size (or cost) necessary to satisfy forecast demand. There are often a myriad of alternative optimal LP solutions and these solutions may differ substantially in terms of secondary criteria. An even dispersion of surplus labor, which is associated with consistent customer service and employee workload, is one of the most important of these secondary criteria. This paper presents a two-stage preemptive goal programming (PGP) approach that enables service operations managers to provide a more even dispersion of surplus labor while maintaining low-cost solutions. The cost incurred for improved surplus dispersion is the time required to run a second mathematical programming model (in this study 1–4 min on a 386 PC). If management has already invested the resources to use LP-based scheduling methods, implementing this alternative model would result in greater consistency of employee workload and customer service.