Multi-objective Large-Scale Staff Allocation

Satalia is working with a multinational company that needs to have a team of 10 people spend 4 months every year manually assigning 1,000 staff to perform 10,000 jobs on 2,000 projects. This is a massive undertaking, in part because of the scale of the problem and in part because the problem is multi-objective with 57 hard and soft business rules. The task can be formulated as a large-scale scheduling problem. We demonstrate that our optimisation methods can unlock substantial savings in company work-hours while also improving quality as measured across a range of objectives. In this paper, we will outline the heuristic and exact approaches utilised, describe some of the many challenges of such a real-world problem, and show how we overcame them.