A Systematic Literature Review of the Personnel Assignment Problem.

Context: Personnel assignment (PA) is an important problem in industry. In general it is about assigning the right people to the right tasks. Operations research plays a big role in solving such problems. Objective: In this paper, we study the personnel assignment problem (PAP) and the proposed solutions to solve it. In addition to that, we aim to identify promising future works from the study results. Methods: We take a systematic approach towards studying the literature of the PAP. A general systematic review method, which has been recently used by a number of researchers in the field of software engineering, was modified and deployed in this study. Results: The analysis results reveal potential solution approaches, the trends in application of existing solution methods, and some potential future research areas. The review process is based on our variation of an existing literature review method. This variation is also presented in the paper. Conclusions: Although a concern in industry, PAP has not been widely studied when compared to other similar fields of research. It has been mainly studied in operations research and in the context of military personnel assignments. It seems that artificial intelligence and machine learning still have a good potential to contribute to this field of research in different applications. Application of PAP in software engineering (SE) is an open area of research. For instance, it looks promising for developer or bug assignments in software development projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]