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Multidimensional military manpower planning based on a career path approach

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Abstract

This article presents a modeling approach to tackle the multidimensional military manpower planning problem. Requirements relevant to military manpower planning include the need to maintain distributions of manpower characteristics (such as rank and age) with respect to career advancement within acceptable proximity to desired norms. Moreover, they include ensuring that the personnel allocated to the various roles of the defence force will be adequate throughout the planning period. Addressing these tasks simultaneously represents a significant challenge for human resources managers. This paper proposes a model that assigns personnel to career paths (CPs) pre-defined as feasible prior to optimization. Adequate solutions through this model are generated by mixed integer goal programming. This solving approach is applied to a case study of the Belgian Defence’s manpower and results in valuable insights for military human resources managers. For the illustration of our approach, we focus on a military organization, but it could be used for any hierarchical organization, such as a police force or a university.

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Funding

The research was not funded by external entities.

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Author notes

  1. Oussama Mazari-Abdessameud

    Present address: Military Polytechnic School, Bordj El Bahri, 16111, Algiers, Algeria

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Military Academy, Department of Mathematics, Renaissancelaan 30, 1000, Brussel, Belgium

    Oussama Mazari-Abdessameud & Filip Van Utterbeeck

  2. General Directorate of Human Resources of the Belgian Defence, Eversestraat 1, 1040, Brussel, Belgium

    Guy Van Acker

  3. Department of Business Technology and Operations, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussel, Belgium

    Marie-Anne Guerry

Authors
  1. Oussama Mazari-Abdessameud
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  2. Filip Van Utterbeeck
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  3. Guy Van Acker
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  4. Marie-Anne Guerry
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Correspondence to Oussama Mazari-Abdessameud.

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The code can be downloaded from : https://github.com/Omazaria/CareerPathBeDef.jl.git.

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Mazari-Abdessameud, O., Van Utterbeeck, F., Van Acker, G. et al. Multidimensional military manpower planning based on a career path approach. Oper Manag Res 13, 249–263 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12063-020-00165-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12063-020-00165-w

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