Arpan Rijal recently received a Veni grant of € 320,000 from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The assistant professor at FEB’s Department of Operations was awarded the grant for his project on personnel scheduling and employee wellbeing in labor-intensive workplaces. He talked to FEB Research about the various factors that affect employee well-being and the role workforce scheduling and logistics can play in this issue.

Arpan Rijal’s academic journey in the Netherlands started at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, were he obtained his PhD. He then joined FEB as a post-doc in the Department of Operations, working alongside Kees Jan Roodbergen and Paul Buijs. In this period, there was an opening within the department for an assistant professor position and Rijal applied. In his research, his core focus is on the use of modelling, optimization and algorithm design for planning problems, with a special focus on transportation and the logistics industry. “Specifically, I have been working on problems such as creating routes for vehicles, designing delivery networks for parcel lockers, and scheduling workers in distribution centers. Interestingly, the methods I am interested in are also used in many other fields, such as energy. For the past two years, I have also been collaborating with colleagues on energy portfolio optimization problems.”

Solving planning problems without simplifying assumptions

In his work, Rijal has been fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate closely with industry partners and has had several opportunities to visit and engage with workers and managers. This has led to new paths in his research. “One issue that came up consistently was the intensive nature of work in many industries and the low retention rates. In one of the projects, I worked on a problem of increasing minimum pay for flexible workers in warehouses, and we were able to find ways to increase minimum pay from 6 hours a day to 8 hours a day through new ways of scheduling breaks. However, pay is only a small part of well-being.”

Literature in occupational health and human factors consistently shows that the very nature of work and how plans are created have an impact on the physical and mental well-being of employees. Unfortunately, most of the literature on personnel scheduling and the available software do not fully consider these needs. “These planning problems are computationally challenging and we make many simplifying assumptions such as ‘employees are alike’ and ‘tasks do not impact well-being’ to help us make our models solvable. However, I consistently kept realizing that these assumptions run against the nature of work and heterogeneity among individuals.” Therefore, for the last few years, Rijal has been trying to find ways to go beyond these simple assumptions and develop tools that explicitly consider the impact of work plans on physical well-being when developing schedules. This goal was the inspiration for the Veni proposal. “We need a new way of developing personnel schedules that consider the impact of task allocation and sequence on worker well-being. This Veni project aims to adapt concepts from occupational health and human factors into an optimization framework when developing schedules.”

Simultaneously considering employee well-being and productivity

In his previous research, Rijal encountered many instances in practice where he found different entities interacting with one another without consideration for their impact on the workforce. Rijal explains: “For example, the transportation department is responsible for developing schedules of trucks and then these plans are imposed on warehouses without any consideration for what impact it has on the workforce. We found that developing plans jointly not only improves efficiency, but also reduces workload pressure. We also found out there are ample opportunities to develop efficient schedules with minimal impact on productivity.”

In recent ongoing work, the assistant professor and his colleagues find that incorporating occupational health and human factors into optimization models can give quite counterintuitive solutions compared to the old ways of scheduling. For example, in addition to the traditional breaks, allowing employees to take smaller and more frequent breaks, which are called micro-breaks, may make the operations more productive, not less.

An alternative approach to personnel scheduling

According to Rijal, an alternative approach to personnel scheduling is desperately needed, especially in labor-intensive industries such as logistics and home health. “We see this consistently from workplace surveys and in communication with labor union representatives. To tackle this challenge, we will first develop the new personnel scheduling approach and work with partners to implement it. In this project, my colleagues and I focus simply on physical measures of well-being, as they are measurable and can be incorporated into optimization models. But, well-being is a much larger construct with many correlated aspects apart from the physical, such as the physiological and the psychological, thus there are many avenues for future interdisciplinary research.” He sees various interesting mathematical and computational challenges that need to be addressed to develop a personnel scheduling framework that can account for diverse aspects of the well-being of workers. “Recent legislations such as the GDPR and the EU AI law present additional challenges on the type and volume of data we can use as input for these models. It is very exciting to address these challenges. I am also very excited about working with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues from law, occupational health, and behavioral sciences to see this project to a successful conclusion.”