Scheduling Workforce and Workflow in a Service Factory
Name
OR-287-94.pdf
Size
2.26 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3801c4509b8de01a07b5f7ab013ce524
Author(s)
Berman, Oded
Larson, Richard C., 1943-
Date Issued
February 1994
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Operations Research Center
Series/Report no.
Operations Research Center Working Paper;OR 287-94
Abstract
We define a service factory to be a network of service-related-workstations, at which assigned workers process work-in-progress that flows through the workstations. Examples of service factory work include mail processing and sorting, check processing and telephoned order processing. Exogenous work may enter the factory at any workstation according to any time-of-day profile. Work-in-progress flows though the factory in discrete time according to Markovian routings. Workers, who in general are cross trained, may work part time or full time shifts, may start work only at designated shift starting times, and may change job assignments at midshift. In order to smooth the flow of work-in-progress through the service factory, work-in-progress may be temporarily inventoried (in buffers) at work stations. The objective is to schedule the workers (and correspondingly, the workflow) in a manner that minimizes labor costs subject to a variety of service-level, contractural and physical constraints. Motivated in part by analysis techniques of discrete time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems, an object-oriented linear programming (OOLP) model is developed. Using exogenous input work profiles typical of large U. S. mail processingfacilities, illustrative computational results are included.
Subjects
Linear programming, scheduling, service, factory, object-oriented, queueing, queueing networks, Markov chains.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center
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