An optimal control approach to manpower planning problem

A manpower planning problem is studied in this paper. The model includes sc heduling different types of workers over different tasks, employing and ter minating different types of workers, and assigning different types of worke rs to various trainning programmes. The aim is to find an optimal way to do all these while keeping the time-varying demand for minimum number of work ers working on each different tasks satisfied. The problem is posed as an o ptimal discrete-valued control problem in discrete time. A novel numerical scheme is proposed to solve the problem, and an illustrative example is pro vided.