Scheduling mobile collaborating workforce for multiple urgent events
Despite the advancement of wireless technologies that allows collaboration at different places, under emergencies, professionals are often still required to arrive at the scene to carry out critical tasks. Under many practical constraints, how to schedule mobile collaborating workforce for urgent event requirements becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we study the optimal mobile workforce assignment problems for multiple events and propose an efficient algorithm to find an optimal workforce arrangement with respect to quick response under qualification and location constraints. A practical example is given to illustrate how our method works. We also study the exception case where there are not enough qualified users. We allow a user to take on multiple qualified tasks previously assigned to different users. But each person is restricted within one event location so as to reduce traffic transfer between different places for the quick response purpose. We analyze the computational complexity of the problem of finding an optimal assignment of mobile workforce under such restraints and solve it by means of integer linear programming. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
scheduling constraint mobile workforce