Industrial Manpower Scheduling

Manpower is a major resource for any system which should be optimally allocated.The importance of manpower scheduling problem attracts researchers to focus their work to find a good solution for this problem.Workforce allocation and personnel scheduling deal with the arrangement of work schedules and assignment of personnel to shifts to cover the demand for this resource over time. This problem arises in manufacturing as well as in services, and air crews.In this thesis, we study the problem of manpower-scheduling of homogenous multi-skill labor in which labor are classified according to their efficiency or experience.The resulted schedule shows the assigned day-off, the assigned shifts, and tasks during a week for each labor, assuming that the problem is cyclic. The problem is represented by integer-programming models and a knowledge-based system built using Prolog language is proposed to solve this problem.This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1, we introduce the manpower scheduling problem in general to bea background about this problem. We present the definitions of some basic terminologies of this problem to help in understanding the problem easily and correctly. Next, we identify the complexity of the manpowerscheduling problem which is proven to be NP-complete. After this, we list theenvironmental conditions of the problem. These conditions should be known to any problem solver to guide him in specifying the problem and reaching a good schedule.Any feasible schedule should have some characteristics to be accepted. Theseharacteristics are indicated in this chapter. To get an optimal schedule you should ollow your steps. These steps are cleared in this chapter. Moreover, the chapter illustrates the objective of any manpower scheduling problem and the considered constraints. Not all the problems should consider all the constraints but we can ignoreome of them according to the type of problem under study. The chapter ends byrowsing the possible solution methods of the manpower scheduling problem.