Managing Workforce Resource Actions with Multiple Feedback Control Schemes

Demand disturbances in service businesses are typically managed by resource actions such as hiring, releasing and cross training of the workforce. The magnitudes of resource actions are often decided by estimating the discrepancy between the demand for services and the supply of workforce. However, naïve feedback control of the resource actions by policies that equate the discrepancy to the control action can produce undesirable effects such as oscillation between hiring and releasing of workforce, and amplified oscillation through the stages of the service processes. Effective combination of multiple feedback control schemes can produce desirable policies of workforce resource actions. In this work, we study application of control theoretic principles in managing resource actions to see how various feedback control schemes can improve costs, utilization and stability of workforce.