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Determine Quantity Of Work To Be Done Based On Current Service Provision, ...


Determine quantity of work to be done based on current service provision, flight patterns and market.
Determine staffing required to do the work (for each time period) and coverage.
Determine total staff size adequate to do the work effectively.
Determine personnel availability and identify areas for recruitment or strategic redeployment of staff.
Match personnel to staffing requirements.
Determine if labour needs and availability mismatches are significant.
Investigate changing the work demand pattern.
Investigate altering the time availability of personnel.
Develop a work schedule.
Develop a workforce scheduling management system.


Aer Arann obviously has already undergone a similar process in order to function competitively in the current market and to allow them to expand their business to the extent that they have already achieved. However, in order to take into account the effects of a necessarily varying shift schedule on staff, this author would like to suggest that a new model should be developed for this company, taking into account some of the issues discussed below. A suggested model can be seen in Table 4 below.
Gunes (1999) does acknowledge the particular challenges of the aviation industry in relation to scheduling. For air crew scheduling problems a different model can be used (Gunes, 1999). A tour of duty (TOD) is defined as a feasible sequence of unbroken flightsights between two ports with given departure and arrival times (Gunes, 1999). The coverage constraint is then that for every flight a crew must be assigned, rather than for every time period minimum required number of workers must be assigned (Gunes, 1999). There are some additional complicating constraints related to the location of flight destinations which affect the duration of flights and therefore the duration of work periods . Therefore, determining alternative feasible work tours is also an important problem to solve for aircrew scheduling in contrast with typical workforce scheduling (Gunes, 1999). There are significant problems with applying standard solutions to scheduling to this employment model. Algorithms based on vehicle routing heuristics and column generation approaches are some examples of solution approaches for this problem (Gunes, 1999).
A variety of shift patterns have been alluded to in the literature on the subject. For example, in the study by Kawachi et al (1995) the participants worked rotating night shifts of at least three nights per month in addition to day and evening shifts. There are lessons to be learned from this. Harrington (1999) seems to suggest that for rotating shifts, rapid forward rotation is the least disruptive option.


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