An exact procedure for planning holidays and working time under annualized hours considering cross-trained workers with different efficiencies

Annualizing working hours is a means of achieving flexibility in the use of human resources to cope with the seasonal nature of demand. Some existing planning procedures are able to minimize costs through the use of overtime and temporary workers. However, due to the great difficulty in solving the problem, it is normally assumed both that holiday weeks are fixed beforehand and that workers from different categories who are able to perform a specific type of task have the same efficiency. Often the reality is different, and thus there is a gap between academic and real problems. In the present paper, those constraints are relaxed and a much more general and true-to-life problem is solved in an exact and very efficient way.