Human resource planning under stochastic capacity demand — The case of data entry service providers

There is always uncertainty associated with human resource planning that are caused by the uncertainties in outsourcing projects, resulting in lack of or surplus human resources in the production process. This paper draws upon the principles and methods used in manufacturing capacity planning, to build a human resource planning model in stochastic demands. The model takes cost as an objective function in stochastic conditions. The stochastic marketing constraint was built through random capacity requirement variables. Based on a two-phase model of stochastic linear constraint, the certainty equation of stochastic human resource planning model is obtained. An algorithm that integrates immune clonal selection algorithm (ICSA) with linear programming (LP) is proposed. Treating human resource variables as preconditions, the LP is used to find solutions to the problem of entry capacity distribution strategy. The solution to entry capacity distribution strategy is then used as affinity function for ICSA. Through immune gene and clonal selection operation, the human resource integral variables are searched until the optimum solution achieved.