Multi-skilled workforce scheduling with training and welfare considerations

Flexibility in workforce scheduling in services is necessary to reduce the impact of demand uncertainty, absenteeism, and desertion while maintaining high service levels. This paper studies the workforce scheduling problem, including multiple skill accumulation, training, and welfare, as well as flexibility for employees and the company. All these elements are modelled and included in a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model that maximises their accumulated skill level. A real case study based on the scheduling of lab assistants to laboratory practices at a university in Colombia is used to generate numerical experiments. Different experiments were conducted, and the results show that the level of skill achieved is highly sensitive to the number of assistants and the number of allocations. The experiments also showed that, while keeping the same number of lab assistants, it is possible to include flexibility and welfare constraints. Finally, the proposed model can generate schedules that achieve high levels of skills and meet the different constraints of the model, including balance, accumulation, demand and welfare.