An optimization model for crew assignment to occupational safety and health inspection

With an increasing work loading on staff, domestic corporations generally find it difficult to construct their occupational safety and health inspection plans with frequent changes of personnel and professional requirements in audit. In addition, there are many shortcomings in manual assignment in practice, such as time-consuming and unfair crew assignment, and so on. Focusing on the occupational safety and health inspection of a domestic electric power company with its current manpower supply, this study applies the integer programming technique to construct a model, which can be solved using LINGO 12.0, by considering related constraints and the objective of minimizing the maximum number of assignments among inspection staff that can simultaneously ensure the fairness and effectiveness of crew assignment. To preliminarily evaluate the model in practice, we perform a case study using real operating data from the electric power company. The results are compared with those from manual assignment to demonstrate the superiority of the model and how it can be an effective improvement over the manual approach with its shortcomings. This study also carries out several parameters sensitivity/case analyses. All of these can be useful references for decision makers to make their occupational safety and health inspection plans.