Simulation Applied to a Consulting Team Assignment Problem

There are intermediary entities that improve the administration of human resources, adapting agents’ profiles with companies’ requests. This paper presents a university social service program that requires student teams to give consultancies to companies’ groups but has a desertion problem derived from an assignment with long distances and incompatibility between schedules and requirements. We use process-oriented simulation to analyze some proposed methodologies and variants of the classic assignment problem as possible solutions while uncovering the need for a flexible method that enables continuous modification and maintains easy user data management. We define our human resources case with multiple attributes (distance, requirements, and schedules) as a multi-criteria assignment model with quadratic (QAP) and qualified semi-assignment characteristics. To solve it, we use a tessellation to facilitate the inclusion and reduction of distances between agents and tasks while evaluating the qualified association of the requirement and schedules as categorical variables. We integrate a modular method based on hexagonal tessellation, reducing the dedicated time from 5 days to 90 min and a total distance of 585 km between students and companies while improving the schedules and requirements compatibility, solving the real problem in its context. We hope this will contribute to other assignment problems with a similar structure or goals.