Airport ground workforce planning with hierarchical skills: a new formulation and branch-and-price approach

Abstract

We address the problem of strategic workforce planning for airport ground staff. The goal is to find a minimum workforce mix that satisfies a target coverage rate with respect to a given demand profile. Based on the classical tour scheduling problem, we propose a new formulation with hierarchical skills in which staff with higher level skills is permitted to cover demands of lower levels. A branch-and-price approach is proposed to solve the model. Numerical experiments based on real-world demand data demonstrate that our approach can efficiently produce near-optimal solutions to the model.