A large engineering firm, Heavy Automation Logistics (HAL), is changing its focus to become a services firm and seeks an efficient way to do this: Integer Programming Assignment, UCD, Ireland

A large engineering firm, Heavy Automation Logistics (HAL), is changing its focus to become a services firm and seeks an efficient way to do this. HAL has identified three categories of customer-facing staff: Engineers, IT Consultants and Business Consultants. It is embarked on a workforce repositioning effort, starting today (2022), wherein it wishes to decrease the number of engineers and increase the numbers of business consultants and IT consultants.

Its approach to achieving this will be a combination of hiring, firing, and training. Coupled with this workforce repositioning, the current economic climate is expected to mean a short-term reduction in the total number of staff required. Table 1 gives the expected number of staff of each category required over the next three years.

HAL wishes to identify its policy to achieve these numbers, in terms of (a) hiring, (b) firing, and (c) training.

A complicating factor is that there is a normal turnover of staff (that is, staff leaving HAL). HAL’s experience is that staff are more likely to leave during their first year. HAL has forecast the staff turnover percentage rates as in Table 2.

Currently, all staff has been working for HAL for more than one year.

The information to hand regarding possibilities of hiring, firing, and training is as follows.