A Decision and Value Approach to Research Personnel Allocation

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Abstract
A problem which exists in a large research laboratory is the allocation of professional people to work on research projects. Each department manager must allocate his personnel so that effectiveness, value of a given man to a given project, is maximized. Computationally, the transportation technique may be used to solve the problem if it is possible to determine the individual coefficients (or effectiveness values) giving the relative value of the ith man to the jth project, for all i, j. This paper describes a technique for determining these effectiveness values. The effectiveness values are subjective, and reflect the value judgments of the department manager and of those who assign projects. The philosophy used in producing the effectiveness values is to simplify the manager's decisionmaking task in expressing his value judgments to comparing only two alternatives with respect to a single criterion at one time. The results of the ratings taken are reduced to produce a set of normalized effectiveness values. The use of the technique in a model allocation problem is shown. The application of the technique need not be confined to a personnel allocation problem, but can be applied to any resource allocation problem where the objective is to optimize a subjective measure.

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