Impact of flexible work contracts and multi-skilled agents on a multi-objective workforce planning problem

This article studies the impact of flexible work contracts and multi-skilled agents on a multi-objective workforce planning problem. Each agent has a work contract with a weekly and daily work capacity. The company has to create a planning for its agents to fulfil the customers' demands. When assigning agents to specific demands, three different objectives have to be attained, including minimising the travel costs between agents' home and their workplace, and maximising agents' satisfaction related to the workload balance between them, and to their preferences for certain working periods. In the context of the evolution of the demands over time, the company has to introduce different levers to increase the level of workforce flexibility. Flexible work contracts and multiple skills are the two levers that are focused on here. The mixed integer linear programming method is used to model and solve the problem. Numerical experiments with real data provided by a Brazilian company show the positive impact of these two levers on the feasibility of problem solving and on the quality of the solutions obtained. Different managerial recommendations based on these results are proposed to companies to help improve their strategy for workforce development.