Staffing model for scheduling simultaneous interpreters under tight constraints

Abstract

The Government Secretariat of Hong Kong has seen steady increases in the need of providing simultaneous interpretation (SI) services at various levels of executive, legislative, legal and urban services meetings. The lack of corresponding addition of interpreters has thus presented a tight manpower scheduling situation. Its distinctive feature of difficultly tight constraint requirements brings out the need of workload balancing and scheduling for equitability, and to critically examine the issues of feasibility versus optimality in a many-rule setting. The solution must also be able to handle subsequent rescheduling, whenever there is a change of either up or down of manpower level, to stay close to its target equitability, which is a function of various jobs with differing difficulty and responsibility. We approach this problem by optimization modelling with computer implementation for its benchmark scenario. Numerical examples are provided as illustrations.