Robust competence assessment for job assignment

Abstract

Allocating the right person to a task or job is a key issue for improving quality and performance of achievements, usually addressed using the concept of ‘‘competences’’. Nevertheless, providing an accu- rate assessment of the competences of an individual may be in practice a difficult task. We suggest in this paper to model the uncertainty on the competences possessed by a person using a possibility distribu- tion, and the imprecision on the competences required for a task using a fuzzy constraint, taking into account the possible interactions between competences using a Choquet integral. As a difference with comparable approaches, we then suggest to perform the allocation of persons to jobs using a robust opti- misation approach, allowing to minimise the risk taken by the decision maker. We first apply this frame- work to the problem of selecting a candidate within n for a job, then extend the method to the problem of selecting c candidates for j jobs using the leximin criterion.