1- Objective of the work.
2- Overview of the manpower scheduling problems.
3- Problem of interest.
4- The proposed Knowledge-based system (KBS).
5- Conclusion.
Find the minimum number of labor required to meet the demand for labor in a continuous manufacturing system, which includes different hierarchical labor skills.
Provid the tour-schedule during a week, which specifies the on-off days and the assigned tasks to each labor in the system.
Manpower scheduling problem is defined as “the problem of optimally matching available labor resources to the needs for labor of an organization considering all applicable constraints”.
Manpower scheduling, workforce scheduling, employee timetabling, staff scheduling, and crew-rostering are different names for the same problem.
The workforce scheduling problem is classified as NP-complete, which can not be solved in polynomial time but whether a given solution is right can be checked in polynomial.
• Scheduling nurses in hospitals,
• Operators in telephone companies,
• Aircrew at airline stations,
• Patrol persons in police departments,
• Workforce at fast food restaurants, and
• Labor in manufacturing systems.
1- Workforce requirement; Workforce requirement determines the needed number of labor for each day and planning period during the cycle.
2- Conflict; An employee can not be assigned to more than one task in the same shift. In addition, an employee can not be assigned to two shifts that are in conflict with each other.
3- Ability; Each employee has his qualifications and personnel skills that enable him to do or not to do certain types of tasks.
4- Work load; Employees can have different number of working hours. The aim of the schedule is to reach an equal number of working hours for each employee.
7- Work and rest periods; The most common rest period is two days per week that may be consecutive or not.
1-Determining the quantity of work to be done; The goal of that task is to predict the characteristics of the system transactions that change over time.
2-Determining the staffing required to do the work for each time period; Calculation of the number and skill levels of labor needed to meet the demand throughout a planning cycle.
3- Developing a workforce schedule; The schedule should supplies sufficient staffing while also accounting for employee requirement.
•The problem of inertest is scheduling hierarchical labor to tasks in continuous systems which operates for three daily shifts through the seven weekly days.
•The problem starts from determining a sufficient workforce size to meet the demand, then scheduling days on and off, and finally assigning labor to tasks.
No employee absenteeism.
We establish a knowledge-based system to solve the manpower scheduling problem with the same predescribed conditions.
The system is built using Visual Prolog V5.2.
The obtained schedule satisfies all the applicable constraints.
The input data is the tasks requirements from each labor type for each shift.
These requirements are summed to form the shift requirements from each labor type.
This step is the proposed algorithm which starts with calculating the workforce size, then assigns on-off shifts and a specific task simultaneously to each labor.
In each assignment iteration, the system searches for a suitable labor which has the minimum workload and assign him a task to do. So, we gurantte that the workload is distributed uniformly among the available labor.
After obtaining the weekly schedule the system distributes the surplus labor on shifts in even manner.
|
|
Day |
||||||
|
Labor |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
|
1 |
D/1 |
E/2 |
E/4 |
N/3 |
-- |
D/4 |
-- |
|
2 |
D/3 |
E/2 |
N/1 |
N/4 |
-- |
E/1 |
-- |
|
3 |
D/3 |
E/3 |
N/2 |
-- |
D/1 |
E/2 |
-- |
|
4 |
D/4 |
E/4 |
N/2 |
-- |
D/2 |
E/3 |
-- |
The resulted number of labor from applying the KBS is equal to that of the integer-programming model. This means that we reach the optimum solution.
The KBS has the advantage of distributing the surplus workdays evenly among days and labor.
In this work, we presented a knowledge-based system built using Visual Prolog V5.2 to solve the tour-scheduling problem in continuous-operating facilities which include hierarchical workforce.
The proposed method is very efficient since its results are the same as integer-programming models.