On the complexity of efficient multi-skilled team composition

Abstract

Workers that master multiple skills increase the flexibility and the working range of teams in organizations. Efficient multi-skilled team formation or workforce composition is therefore paramount for the organization’s success. In this paper, we study various multi-skilled workforce formation problems that are complementary to problems in the scheduling literature. The goal of these problems is to design a set of multi-skilled workers (or resources) that can fulfill a certain skill demand. More specifically, we investigate the complexity of problems that minimize the skill availability or the size of the workforce. Next, we look at the impact of specific skill and worker characteristics on the complexity of these problems. We propose a set of fixed individual multi-skilled workforce problems, in which the number of available skills per skill type or the number of mastered skills per worker is defined upfront. Furthermore, we introduce and discuss the complexity of fixed total multi-skilled workforce problems in which either the total skill availability or the workforce size is fixed and the other quantity is minimized. We conclude this paper by applying the presented problems to real-life projects and by performing computational experiments that analyze the empirical hardness of the multi-skilled workforce problems.