Multi-skilled manpower scheduling with part-time consideration: Case study

Service sectors such as F&B will require the use of precious manpower resources in order to fulfil customer demands. Given the tight labor resource in recent years, equipping current workers with multiple skills is one of the common approaches. Using the mathematical programming model to incorporate various multi-skilled workers and obtaining the optimal solution is highly intractable, especially with the increase in the number and permutations of skill sets. In this paper, a heuristic catering to the allocation of multi-skilled full-time and part-time workers is proposed. The heuristic is able to generate a solution approximately of an average of 10% deviation from the branch and bound solution with a significant reduction in computation time, based on the industry data from a restaurant in the F&B sector.