A project scheduling and staff assignment model considering learning effect

In a multi-project environment, we sometimes need to periodically schedule the tasks for each project and assign staff to the tasks. Such a decision-making problem has been studied in literature; however, learning effect of staff has not been considered in previous studies. This research formulates a mixed nonlinear program for project scheduling and staff allocation problems, which considers learning effect of staff. The objective function is to minimize outsourcing costs. A genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to solve the problem. Experiments for solving various sizes of test problems has been carried out to validate the proposed GA.