The Scientific World Journal
Volume 2014 (2014), Article ID 924120, 16 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/924120
Integrated Project Scheduling and Staff Assignment with Controllable Processing Times
Industrial Management, School of Engineering, University of Seville, Camino de los Descubrimientos, s/n, 41092 Seville, Spain
Received 11 January 2014; Accepted 19 February 2014; Published 24 April 2014
Academic Editors: J. G. Barbosa and D. Oron
Copyright © 2014 Victor Fernandez-Viagas and Jose M. Framinan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
This paper addresses a decision problem related to simultaneously scheduling the tasks in a project and assigning the staff to these tasks, taking into account that a task can be performed only by employees with certain skills, and that the length of each task depends on the number of employees assigned. This type of problems usually appears in service companies, where both tasks scheduling and staff assignment are closely related. An integer programming model for the problem is proposed, together with some extensions to cope with different situations. Additionally, the advantages of the controllable processing times approach are compared with the fixed processing times. Due to the complexity of the integrated model, a simple GRASP algorithm is implemented in order to obtain good, approximate solutions in short computation times.