Multi-period decision for HRP of an employee leasing center with one type of employees

This paper studies the issue of human resource plan in an employee leasing center. The center is engaged in the business of leasing its own contract employees and acting as an agent for flexible employees outside the center. The employees considered in this paper belong to one type of employees that are high-ranked and important for the firms. But this type of employees can be classified into two parts: the contract employees in the employee leasing center and the temporary employees in the manpower market. At first we take into account recruitment/dismissal factors and propose stochastically optimal multi-period decision model of the problem. In the model there are stochastic constraint conditions and the decision (control) in each period is the number of the contract employees that are recruited or dismissed by the center and the objective is to maximize the overall expected net revenue of the center over planning horizon. Then we transform the stochastic optimal control problem into the determined optimal control problem by transforming stochastic constraint conditions into determined constraint conditions. Furthermore we analyze the limits of the states in each period, develop a dynamic programming algorithm to search for an optimal solution to the problem and a heuristic approximate algorithm to find out an approximate optimal solution. Analyzing reveals that the heuristic algorithm is superior to the dynamic programming in time complexity. Finally, we use two algorithms to solve some simulating data case. The results reveal that the error between the two solutions is no more than 5% for each case.