A Conceptual Framework for Project Scheduling with Multi-Skilled Resources

The success of a project depends, mostly, on the ability to create multi-skilled teams and to assign them to project's tasks, without creating multi-tasking and over-allocation. In this respect, the Multi-skilled Work Force Scheduling Problem has attracted a great interest, both for academicals and practitioners. Unfortunately, most of the academic works produced so far, has not yet found its way into practice, mainly because of a complex and rigid mathematical formulation, which poses a serious constraint on the precision of the input data. To solve this criticality, we abandon the over optimistic idea of a global optimum and we propose a hierarchical framework that extends the well-known Dynamic Scheduling approach. The focus is on the resource assignment phase, with the objective to allocate multi-skilled resources in a quasi-optimal way, so as to assure project quality and a harmonious development of the workforce.