| Summary: | Manpower planning is concerned with planning the use of human resources. In this thesis, manpower planning is defined as the process of determining manpower policies which ensure that suitable numbers of qualified people are in appropriate positions at the right times in order to meet organisational goals, while taking account of the career development opportunities of the individuals within the organisation. A number of different mathematical models have been developed for manpower planning. These models are reviewed and it is noted that a weakness of the optimisation models which have been proposed is that promotion rates, i.e. the proportion of staff promoted per year, can vary substantially from year to year because of the limitations of the techniques used. Since staff morale is likely to be affected if promotion rates vary significnatly from one year to another, the results from these models may be unacceptable to management. In this thesis a mixed integer programming (MIP) manpower planning model is developed for determining minimum cost manpower policies in which promotion rates remain stable over time, and which satisfy specified staffing level requirements. In this MIP model promotion rates are treated as decision variables by using a binary variable representation. An iterative procedure is developed for solving this MIP model. The computational aspects of using the MIP manpower planning model are investigated. A demonstration decision support system based on this MIP model is developed, and the use of this system is illustrated using representative data for a military manpower system. The experience with this demonstration system suggests that the approach could be developed to produce a practical tool to aid management decision making.
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