Multiobjective PSO Algorithm in Project Staff Management

The assignment of staff to projects is a regular activity for many contractors, government agencies and consulting firms. Whereas the primary objective of the assignment is to maximize the overall profit, issues dealing with manpower management must also be incorporated to ensure strong morale and to enhance competitiveness. Such issues include to avoid excessive overtime and to balance workloads. The present study develops a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to handle the assignment problem with multiple objectives, which creates difficulty for conventional optimization techniques. The proposed algorithm is tested on an application case to illustrate its performance. It has also been compared to LINGO, a commercial optimization package.