Staff Roles Experiment Setup

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berkowicz-k asked Feb 19 2025 at 3:02 PM Felix Möhlmann answered Feb 20 2025 at 12:42 PM

Staff Roles Experiment Setup

Hello,

I would like to run an experiment where I assign different sets of tasks for each staff member. For example if I have 10 tasks and 5 staff members the experiment would iterate through every way to divide those 10 tasks among 5 staff members. And I would repeat the experiment with 5,6,7 etc number of staff members. What would be the easiest way to set this up via experimenter?

Thank you!

Software Version:

FlexSim 21.0.10

experimenter staff task staff member

Answer 1 · 2025-02-20T12:42:51Z

Felix Möhlmann answered Feb 20 2025 at 12:42 PM

The easiest (only) option that comes to mind is to write an algorithm that maps the numbers from 1 to N to unique assignments permutations. Where N would be total number of such permutations. Then you use a single parameter that takes on every value from 1 to N.

Before you do that though, just so you are aware: There are 42525 ways of distributing 10 tasks among 5 workers. That is with each worker getting at least one task, the workers being interchangeable and the order of tasks for a given worker not mattering (and assuming that my math is correct). I have attached a model with the script to calculate this number. If you do decide to undertake this, it might be a useful reference/starting point.

permutation-calc.fsm

Other options I see are using a sequence parameter to determine in which order the tasks will be given out. Each task just gets assigned to the first available worker. Using the optimizer you will likely find a good task order in much fewer experiment runs.

Or you calculate (or use a heuristic to estimate) the total duration of each task. A worker then always picks the longest one. As long as the duration is accurate, this should result in the quickest possible order automatically.

permutation-calc.fsm (135.0 KiB)

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