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Results of Experimentation with a Decision Support System for Workforce Planning at Louisville MetroSafe – UL07-MTRO

This project is on the scheduling of employees of a specific department using a decision support system (DSS) and an optimization tool software for workforce planning.

Sponsor:

Louisville Metro

Research Team:

Gerald W. Evans

Universities Involved:

University of Louisville

Start Date:

03/01/07

End Date:

02/28/08

Summary:

The experimentation is on the scheduling of call takers at MetroSafe using a decision support system (DSS). The experimentation involves:

* Defining a criterion model which implicitly considers the tradeoffs that MetroSafe management is willing to make among the various performance measures associated with the system
* Defining a set of weekly shifts for call takers
* Running an optimization algorithm (using OptQuest tool associated with the Arena software package) to determine the “near optimal” numbers of call takers to assign to each of the defined weekly shifts.
The objectives of this project were to:

* Define a criterion model which implicitly considers the tradeoffs that MetroSafe management is willing to make among the various performance measures.
* Define a weekly schedule consisting of a number of weekly shifts.
* Define the respective variables associated with the numbers of call takers to assign to each of the weekly shifts defined, and determine the call taker capacity schedule defined as a function of these variables over time.
* Employ the OptQuest tool associated with the Arena software package in order to determine a near optimal solution for the numbers of call takers to assign to the various shifts according to the criterion model defined in