Title: An heuristic algorithm for fair strategic personnel assignment in continuous operation

Authors: Eero Immonen; Ari Putkonen

Addresses: Faculty of Technology, Environment and Business, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Sepankatu 1, 20700 Turku, Finland ' Faculty of Technology, Environment and Business, Turku University of Applied Sciences, Sepankatu 1, 20700 Turku, Finland

Abstract: This article introduces an heuristic initialise-and-refine algorithm for fair strategic (long-term) personnel assignment in continuous operation. Here, continuous operation refers to stable, reoccurring parallel work processes, with known tasks and constant demand - an example of which is given by university tuition on a degree program across many years. The proposed method attempts to address both the employees' competency-preference matching and the workload balancing aspects of fairness simultaneously, in situations where the task schedule across the parallel production lines is known beforehand. As an application, the proposed method is successfully used for optimising the module assignment of teachers in a Mechanical Engineering degree program at a Finnish university.

Keywords: personnel assignment; strategic planning; competency matching; preference matching; workload balancing; heuristic algorithm.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2020.110917

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2020 Vol.15 No.5, pp.410 - 424

Received: 22 Nov 2018
Accepted: 23 Dec 2019
Published online: 01 Nov 2020 *

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