CHOIR in practice

Personnel preferences in personnel planning and scheduling
Egbert van der Veen

The personnel of an organization often has two conflicting goals. On the one hand, there is the individual goal to have a good work-life balance. On the other hand, since personnel wages form a major part of the operational cost, there is a common goal to be effective and efficient. By applying techniques from Operations Research, a subfield of applied mathematics, we show that operational efficiency can be achieved while taking personnel preferences into account. In the design of optimization methods, we explicitly consider that these methods should enable the business users to understand and effectively steer the outcomes of these methods. Designing such methods, and applying these to personnel scheduling methods is at the core of the research in this dissertation.

Biography: 

Egbert van der Veen was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands on November 20th, 1984. Egbert obtained his VWO diploma at CSG Liudger in Drachten in 2003. In 2007, he earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Business Mathematics from the University of Groningen for which he developed a method to determine an all-time speed skaters ranking. In 2009, he earned a cum laude Master’s of Science degree in Business mathematics and a cum laude Master’s of Science degree in Econometrics, Operations Research & Actuarial Studies, both at the University of Groningen. His Master’s thesis was the basis for the research in Chapter 7 of this dissertation, in which an integration of two often separately addressed scheduling decisions is proposed. In 2009, Egbert started as a personnel planning and scheduling consultant at ORTEC, and as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Twente (UT), under the supervision of Richard Boucherie, Erwin Hans, and Bart Veltman. As a consultant at ORTEC, he is involved in the design, development and implementation of personnel planning and scheduling software and algorithms. Customer cases and practice applications initiated the various research topics in his Ph.D. research, which culminates with this dissertation.