Manpower planning optimization in three different real world areas: container terminals, hospitals and retail stores

Problems related to the optimization of human resources in working areas have been extensively studied in the literature with the major goal of guaranteeing the greatest benefits from the efforts of workers, while taking into account their personal skills and requirements. In particular, in this thesis we focus on short-term and long-term manpower planning problems. The main goal consists in appropriately assigning shifts to workers in a given time horizon, taking into account their own requirements, their contractual rules, and the quality and efficiency of the work environment. In this thesis the manpower planning problem is studied in three different working areas, namely container terminals, hospitals and retail stores. Different solutions are proposed based on mathematical models that allow to describe in linear algebraic terms the set of feasible solutions. An optimal scheduling is then computed using linear integer programming. The proposed policies have been validated on three different real case studies in Cagliari, Italy.