Integrated training course planning and hierarchical multi-skilled employee scheduling in the workforce skill transformation context

The technological advances in many areas bring new skill requirements to the workforce, leading to a large number of workers facing the need of skill transformation and an increasing demand for workforce skill training. For many companies, to meet the complex and changing skill requirements of their tasks, their employees must be trained before being assigned to fulfill these tasks. As a result, when planning the training courses and scheduling the tasks of a company, a series of complex constraints related to the precedence of training and tasks, task-dependent skill requirements, course capacity, etc., should be taken into account, which poses a significant challenge for the management of the company. To solve this challenge, in this paper, we first formulate an integer programming model for the integrated training course and employee scheduling problem (ITCESP) to maximize the company’s total profits. Secondly, we develop a column-generation-based heuristic (CGBH) algorithm to obtain approximate solutions while achieving a high computational efficiency as well as a desirable solution accuracy. Thirdly, based on the context of home services, we simulate 18 sets of test instances and validate the advantages of the CGBH algorithm. Finally, through scenario comparisons and sensitivity analyses on key parameters, we provide practitioners with useful managerial insights.