Allocation of Staff and Equipment to Tasks

Chan Wen Feei

Abstract

The allocation of manpower and equipment is a major problem in many industries. This problem is particularly significant in organizations where personnel and equipment are low in supply. Thus proper planning musst be made to allocate the personnel and equipments to tasks in order to maximize the number of tasks that can be carried out. This report explores the use of constraint programming, particularly ILOG Scheduler for solving such resource allocation problems by applying the problem to a simplified organizational setting. An attempt was also made to compare the performance of the Constraint Programming model to a Mixed Integer Programming model by evaluating their solving time and quality of the solutions obtained. These comparisons were made over different scenarios, where the problem size, the number of resources, and the number of tasks in a day are varied. Limitations of the two models are also discussed in the report, and recommendations are proposed for future developments.