The importance of workforce scheduling as a decision support system mo-
tivates the creation of new and ecient models and methods. Organizations are be-
coming increasingly aware of the importance of empowering employees by involving
them in decision making. However, the incorporation of empowerment concept in con-
ventional models of workforce scheduling has been scarcely investigated. The great
bene ts promised by empowerment management concept motivated us to investigate
workforce scheduling techniques that take employees' interests into consideration. In
this paper, the empowerment from a management perspective is discussed, and hence
the constitutions of empowerment in workforce scheduling, and an ecient empower-
ment scheduling model are de ned. Furthermore, a new empowerment scheduling model
that applies a constraint satisfaction approach in order to incorporate the empower-
ment management strategy is proposed. The new model provides employees with an
explicit empowerment practice through which they can plan their own speci c schedule.
Simplicity,
exibility, transparency and fairness are main features of the new model.
The model has been applied to solve a workforce scheduling problem which involves
scheduling a multi-skilled workforce to geographically dispersed tasks. Numerical re-
sults are given to illustrate the e ectiveness and usefulness of the model.
Overview:
In this project, a new empowerment scheduling model that applies a constraint satisfaction approach in order to incorporate the empowerment management strategy is proposed.
Research
