The Crew Allocation project aims at supporting the work for Frontline Operators at production plant assets. It produces high-quality crew and role allocations for a set of personnel with given competencies, and also provides replacement strategies for crew repairs, in both planned and unplanned circumstances.

Crew allocation and crew repair has been extensively researched and a number of commercial tools exist, but every application domain has their own special properties and constraints that are not present currently. Existing tools often present themselves as ‘the’ solution, ignoring the end user’s domain and personnel knowledge, when what is needed is a collaborative human-centric approach between the rostering tool and the operators.

We combined the knowledge of our in-house optimisation excellence to develop cutting-edge optimisation models to tackle the underlying problem, and added our visualisation expertise to create a user interface to interact with the system to provide explainability, exploration of what-if scenarios, and adding desired preferences to control solution output.

The optimisation part uses a multi-objective cost function to represent different aspects, such as fairness, restedness, expertise, and more.

The user interface adds novel visualisations to explain aspects of a solution. For example in the application of crew repair it visualises the replacement strategy in different ways, i.e. who is replacing who, and when. The system allows the user to influence solutions to explore what-if scenarios and adding their own preferences, for example, "do not use that particular person", or "keep this group of people together in a crew".

This special application is developed in close cooperation with our industry partner and is in active use.