A two‐stage stochastic program for scheduling and allocating cross‐trained workers

A two‐stage stochastic program is developed for scheduling and allocating cross‐trained workers in a multi‐department service environment with random demands. The first stage corresponds to scheduling days‐off over a time horizon such as a week or month. The second stage is the recourse action that deals with allocating available workers at the beginning of a day to accommodate realized demands. After the general two‐stage model is formulated, a special case is introduced for computational testing. The testing helps quantify the value of cross‐training as a function of problem characteristics. Results show that cross‐training can be more valuable than perfect information, especially when demand uncertainty is high.