Multi-criteria personnel scheduling considering the robustness of production systems

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Berend Denkena
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423805508

For industrial companies, it is becoming increasingly challenging to accomplish effective production planning under fluctuating influences and to achieve the defined corporate goals that depend on such planning. The demographic change and the lack of skilled workers have led to the fact that personnel scheduling is continuously gaining in importance. The majority of industrial companies limit their personnel scheduling to the allocation of workers based on the highest performance for a particular task. Criteria such as personnel development support, coordination of training processes and the extension of the working time sovereignty of the workforce are not taken into account. Exploiting the above-mentioned potential of personnel scheduling and at the same time ensuring short-term performance is therefore currently a challenge for industrial companies.The main objective of this research project is therefore the investigation of a multi-criteria personnel scheduling considering the robustness of a production system. Consequently, it will be possible for personnel scheduling to achieve both personnel-related, rather long-term objectives and performance-related, rather short-term objectives to the same extent. In order to achieve the main objective, four sub-objectives are aimed at: In the first subobjective the extension of existing methods for the description of the robustness of a production system takes place based on the robustness analysis of individual process chain elements. This will allow describing the robustness as a function of individual workplaces and consequently with respect to personnel influence. Based on this, the second subobjective describes personnel-related influencing factors on robustness using the example of personnel competences, learning behaviour and personnel availability. The achievement of the second subobjective enables the multi-criteria evaluation of production systems based on robustness. Furthermore, an algorithm for multi-criteria personnel scheduling is developed for the third subobjective. This resulting method will be directly applicable in production planning and control. Finally, a detailed understanding of the developed methodology will be gained in the fourth subgoal with the help of application-oriented simulation studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants