Organisation et planification de la main-d'oeuvre: Applications en sante et en industrie

This thesis studies workforce planning in two contexts: homecare and manufacturing. In homecare, nurses have to visit clients and assure the follow-up of the cases in the best way. Equilibrium between the nurses workload is a good measure of the nurses satisfaction and service quality, pushing the workload assignment to nurses to the first rank. Following the same idea, competition pushes industries to manage workforce planning in the best way not only to fit the demand, but also to prioritize the employees satisfaction. These two contexts are under irregular and variable demand environment.;In the second part of the thesis, we consider the problem of assigning patients to nurses for CLSC CDN. The aim is to balance the workload of the nurses while avoiding long trips to visit the patients. We propose a new approach combining territorial approach and workload. The flexibility of the borders between districts is also introduced as well as a workload measure based on the number of visits, traveling, number of cases and the complexity of these cases. We model the problem as a multi-resource generalized assignment problem, which is known to be NP-hard, where the objective is to minimize the gap between workloads. Some constraints are non-linear and the objective function is quadratic, motivating the use of heuristic methods to solve the problem. We propose a Tabu Search algorithm using complex movements and neighborhoods. A simplification of the workload measure leads to a linear mixed integer program which we optimize using CPLEX.;The last problem we study is the flexibility in multiple-shift workforce planning problem occuring in a real industrial case. The annualized hours approach is one of best ways to fit the fluctuations demand. We develop a mixed integer programming model that seeks to propose different solutions minimizing either the workforce size, the overtime or the workload. Different working arrangements are introduced as part time workers or gradual hiring approach. We finally test the impact of changing the length of shifts from twelve to eight hours. All these versions are solved using CPLEX and show that the use of a form of flexibility in workforce planning gives very good results.;In the first part of this thesis, we analyze a territorial approach to deliver nursing home care services currently practiced at the CLSC Côte-des-Neiges site (CLSC CDN) since 1980. The territorial approach consists of assigning nurses to districts and assigning them to the population without considering their impact on the workload. Starting with the comparison of the number of visits between 1998-1999 and 2002-2003, we show that the territorial approach to deliver homecare nursing services does not resist to fluctuations in population needs for services. It is difficult to quantify the true needs for services since the availability of nursing services tend to determine the services actually delivered resulting in service delivery inequities across the entire territory. Therefore, a more dynamic assignment of clients to the nurses based on each nurse's workload and case load rather than based on the geographic location of clients is necessary to ensure a more equitable case load attribution between nurses as well as fewer inequities between clients in terms of service delivery considering their needs.