Manpower Allocation with Time Windows and Job Teaming Constraints

In the Manpower Allocation Problem with Time Windows and Job-Teaming Constraints (MAPTWTC), we have a set of jobs located at various locations where each job requires a team of workers. Each job has a time window and a job duration, during which everyone on the team has to be present. The job requirement is satisfied if and only if the required composite team works for long enough duration within the job's time window. The objective of the problem is find a schedule to minimize a weighted sum of the total number of workers, the total travelling distances of all workers and their total waiting time. Two main approaches are proposed in the paper which are shown to be able to obtain very good performance

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The four major topics of discussion included: the NASA Software Engineering Laboratory, software testing, human factors in software engineering and software quality assessment. As in the past years, there were 12 position papers presented (3 for each topic) followed by questions and very heavy participation by the general audience

Short-term manpower management in manufacturing systems: new requirements and DSS prototyping

The short-term planning and scheduling of discrete manufacturing systems has mostly focused in the past on the management of machines, implicitly considered as the critical resources of the workshops. Some of the present schedulers claim to also manage human resources, but perform most of the time a local allocation of operators to machines, these operators having regular working hours. However, it seems clear that the workforce has a specificity that should be better taken into account by short-term planning facilities. Moreover, the variability of the weekly working hours through the year will shortly become a rule and not anymore an exception. On the base of a questionnaire answered by 19 French companies of different sizes and industrial sectors, we have tried to identify more precisely some industrial requirements concerning the short-term management of human resources. The growing interest in annualised hours together with the lack of software tools that allow to implement it practically is one of the results of this questionnaire. We suggest in this article the specification of a decision support system for short-term manpower management under annualised hours, taking into account the competence of the operators. A software prototype has been developed according to these specifications; the results of a simple but representative example are described

Management techniques - A compilation

Engineering, finance, and personnel management methods and computer techniques for cost reduction and reliability in project plannin

Predictive policing management: a brief history of patrol automation

Predictive policing has attracted considerably scholarly attention. Extending the promise of being able to interdict crime prior to its commission, it seemingly promised forms of anticipatory policing that had previously existed only in the realms of science fiction. The aesthetic futurism that attended predictive policing did, however, obscure the important historical vectors from which it emerged. The adulation of technology as a tool for achieving efficiencies in policing was evident from the 1920s in the United States, reaching sustained momentum in the 1960s as the methods of Systems Analysis were applied to policing. Underpinning these efforts resided an imaginary of automated patrol facilitated by computerised command and control systems. The desire to automate police work has extended into the present, and is evident in an emergent platform policing – cloud-based technological architectures that increasingly enfold police work. Policing is consequently datafied, commodified and integrated into the circuits of contemporary digital capitalism

Deep space network resource scheduling approach and application

Deep Space Network (DSN) resource scheduling is the process of distributing ground-based facilities to track multiple spacecraft. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has carried out extensive research to find ways of automating this process in an effort to reduce time and manpower costs. This paper presents a resource-scheduling system entitled PLAN-IT with a description of its design philosophy. The PLAN-IT's current on-line usage and limitations in scheduling the resources of the DSN are discussed, along with potential enhancements for DSN application

Decision-based genetic algorithms for solving multi-period project scheduling with dynamically experienced workforce

The importance of the flexibility of resources increased rapidly with the turbulent changes in the industrial context, to meet the customers’ requirements. Among all resources, the most important and considered as the hardest to manage are human resources, in reasons of availability and/or conventions. In this article, we present an approach to solve project scheduling with multi-period human resources allocation taking into account two flexibility levers. The first is the annual hours and working time regulation, and the second is the actors’ multi-skills. The productivity of each operator was considered as dynamic, developing or degrading depending on the prior allocation decisions. The solving approach mainly uses decision-based genetic algorithms, in which, chromosomes don’t represent directly the problem solution; they simply present three decisions: tasks’ priorities for execution, actors’ priorities for carrying out these tasks, and finally the priority of working time strategy that can be considered during the specified working period. Also the principle of critical skill was taken into account. Based on these decisions and during a serial scheduling generating scheme, one can in a sequential manner introduce the project scheduling and the corresponding workforce allocations