Manpower planning with annualized hours flexibility: a fuzzy mathematical programming approach

Abstract

We have considered the problem of annualized hours (AH) in workforce management. AH is a method of distributing working hours with respect to the demand over a year. In this paper, the basic Manpower planning problem with AH flexibility is formulated as a fuzzy mathematical programming problem with flexible constraints. Three models of the AH planning problem under conditions of fuzzy uncertainty are presented using different aggregation operators. These fuzzy models soften the rigidity of the deterministic model by relaxing some constraints with the use of flexible programming. Finally, an illustration is given with a computational experiment performed on a realistic-scale case problem of an automobile company to demonstrate and analyze the effectiveness of the fuzzy approach over a deterministic model.