Conference Agenda

Amidst the current challenges of the food industry, including an ever-expanding product variety, optimizing planning processes within production becomes imperative. Due to a shortage of skilled workers, heterogeneous qualifications, and interdependencies between departments and employees, efficient workforce assignment is critical. This work studies a real-world worker assignment problem of a German organic food company. The main particularity is the consideration of a heterogeneous workforce regarding employees' qualifications and skill levels. Additionally, this work includes production-based time intervals as well as shift plans. An integer linear program (ILP) is introduced to assign the workforce optimally. The company's primary goal is to use its staff efficiently and avoid needing temporary workers due to insufficient staff or qualifications. Therefore, the objective function minimizes inefficient assignments and the use of temporary workers. The ILP is used to present an employee schedule to the personnel planners as real-world decision support. Additionally, the solutions point out the company's worker assignment potential, revealing staff utilization inefficiencies, qualification shortages, and imbalances.