Empowerment-based Workforce Scheduling Problem∗

The Workforce Scheduling Problem (WSP) concerns the scheduling of a multi-skilled workforce to geographically dispersed tasks. An effective solution to the problem is critical to companies’ performance and success. Organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of enhancing employee empowerment and involvement in decision making. However, traditional approaches implemented to tackle the WSP neglect this concept, despite the fact that employee efficiency is crucial to the effectiveness of any workforce scheduling system. The great benefits promised by empowerment management concepts motivated us to investigate the deployment of empowerment in designing the workforce scheduling system. This paper proposes a new model that applies a constraint satisfaction approach in order to incorporate the empowerment management strategy. A prototype has been developed and its efficiency has been evaluated.