Competence-driven employee substitutability planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism

In order to deal with unexpected events such as employee absenteeism and/or a demand for personnel that is higher or lower than expected, organizations need to adopt proactive and reactive scheduling strategies to protect the personnel roster and to respond to this operational variability, respectively. In this paper, we propose a preemptive programming approach to construct a personnel shift roster that maximizes the employee substitutability. A proactive approach builds in a certain degree of robustness in the original roster. This built-in robustness improves both the absorption and adjustment capability of the original roster during the operational allocation phase when unexpected events occur. With a view to developing a DSS-driven method dedicated to competence allocation planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism, we present a methodology, based on constraints programming and robust employee competence structure concepts. Introduced approach allows to find an employee competence structure robust to a given set of disruptions while guaranteeing an admissible personnel allocation to the assumed set of tasks. Potential applications of the proposed solution are discussed using examples.