A competency-driven staff assignment approach to improving employee scheduling robustness

Presented paper concerns the competency-driven staff assignment and scheduling approach to the management of project portfolios subject to perturbations caused by employee absences and/or unexpected arrival of high priority jobs. Proactive strategy is considered, which exploits the concept of employee substitutability to improve the robustness of personnel allocation in the case of occurrence of specific types of disruptions. Solutions obtained using the model of a constraint satisfaction problem developed in this study are validated in series quantitative and qualitative experiments. With a view to future implementation in a Decision Support Systems dedicated to prototyping of proactive personnel allocation, a methodology employing the concept of a competency framework-based robustness measure is proposed. Implemented in a declarative framework, the proposed approach allows one to find a redundant competency framework robust to a given set of disruptions.