C YBER-PHYSIC AL-SOCIAL SYS TE MS
Editor: Liuqing Yang, Colorado State University, liuqingyang.ieee@gmail.com
Intelligent Human Resource
Planning System in a Large
Petrochemical Enterprise
Yizheng Wang and Lefei Li, Tsinghua University
Liuqing Yang, Colorado State University
A
lthough Chinese petrochemical enterprises
have devoted considerable effort to human
resource management, several challenging situa-
tions can arise that cause serious problems, such
as the great likelihood of talent outflow, especially
for high-level personnel; the shortage of qualified
technicians while having too many low-level person-
nel; and a diversity in age levels that doesn’t always
balance well with a team’s hierarchical structure.
Furthermore, the uncertainties of internal and ex-
ternal environments also impact human resources.
The internal environment includes changes in the
production plans, organizational structure, human
resource strategies, and capacity structure. The ex-
ternal environment includes competitors’ strategy,
job market situation, and other economic condi-
tions. With all of these challenges, the critical de-
cisions are, however, made either empirically or
based on myopic rules.
Here, we use Petrochemical enterprise M,
abbreviated as PM, as a case study to show how
artificial systems have the potential to support
human resource planning in large and comprehen-
sive enterprises.
PM is one of the largest refinery and chemical
companies in China, with more than 9,000 employ-
ees in 20 subsidiary units. Through human resource
structure analyses as well as field interviews and
surveys, we found that imbalances in the age struc-
ture and unexpected employee resignations are two
major problems that could cause significant risk.
Structure of Human Resources in PM
Human resources in PM is comprised of three
tracks: skilled, professional, and management teams,
with various subsidiary roles (see Figure 1). Around
102 1541-1672/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE
Published by the IEEE Computer Society
IS-28-04-Cpss.indd 102
90 percent of employees are working in positions di-
rectly related to the daily operation. Here, we target
a key workshop and focus on the skilled team; pro-
fessional team; and the device manager, the work-
shop vice director, and the workshop director from
the management team. (For others’ work, see the re-
lated sidebar.)
In general, for any employee, the main factors
affecting his/her income and other benefits usually
involve the employee’s position and grade (profes-
sional/skill level). We illustrate an employee’s po-
tential career paths in Figure 2.
The promotion between positions is highly re-
lated to the change of grade level. A novice can
choose one of two tracks: skilled or professional,
as in Figure 2b. Each track has multiple levels that
have clear promotion requirements in between.
An Artificial Human Resource System
With our understanding of the human resource struc-
ture, we built an artificial human resource system
that uses an agent-based simulation method to model
and simulate human resource dynamics in PM.
Using the basic elements that comprise the hu-
man resource system, employees are modeled as
the main agents. Each agent has its own properties,
such as age, gender, working experience, grade, and
so on. Accordingly, each agent has five types of be-
haviors: recruitment, retirement, grade promotion,
position promotion, and leaving.
Recruitment behavior is decided by human re-
source planning while retirement behavior is de-
cided by the agent’s age property. In most cases,
male employees will retire at 60 and female
employees will retire at 55.
Grade promotion behavior is related to the agent’s
educational background and working experience. For
IEEE INtEllIgENt systEMs
16/10/13 8:06 PM
 Related Work on Human Resource Planning
S
ince the 21st century, talent has gradually become the
most important strategic resource for an enterprise,
even for a country. In recent developments of human re-
source management, the “human-centered” concept has be-
come the core guiding ideology, and employees are regarded
as the critical resource to enterprises and organizations.
In human resource management, human resource planning
is the key decision process at the strategic level, and it has a
critical impact on maintaining stable human resource develop-
ment. This process includes planning recruitment, promotions,
and training. Researchers’ have been focusing on two types of
problems: the workforce forecasting problem1,2 and the man-
power/workforce planning problem. For the planning prob-
lem, heuristics,3 stochastic programming,4 goal programming,5
optimal control,6 and dynamic programming7–9 approaches
have been employed to get the optimal decision or policy.
Although current studies have considered the human ­resource
planning problem with constraints in recruitment capacity, the
training budget, office space, and so on—while also consider-
ing demand fluctuations and other uncertain factors—how to
explicitly incorporate the employee’s career-related behaviors
(such as promotions and demotions) and the underlying motiva-
tions in the planning process is still a challenging problem.
In this article, we focus on recruitment and promotion
planning, to demonstrate that decision support can be facili-
tated by an artificial human resource system.
those who meet the requirements and
want to obtain the promotion, they will
trigger the promotion behavior through
certain promotion rates, which corre-
spond to passing skill tests in reality.
Position promotion behavior is not
only related to the agent’s educational
Skilled team
background and working years, but
is also based on the agent’s grade.
The promotion mechanism is simi-
Outside
lar to the grade promotion. Only the operator
trigger rules are different.
Separation behavior is usually related
to an individual’s characteristics. Con- Board
servative employees tend to be satis- operator
fied with their current grade and won’t
leave, while ambitious employees tend
to leave when they aren’t promoted to Vice monitor
the expected grade in a certain period
of time. We use Figure 3 to describe the
agent’s separation behavior.
In Figure 3, E represents the agent’s Monitor
promotion motivation and P represents
the expected value provided by each
position to meet the agent’s p ­ romotion Figure 1. Human resource composition structure. There are three main tracks
motivation. If the current position’s (skilled, professional, and management teams), each with various subsidiary roles.
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IS-28-04-Cpss.indd 103
References
1. D. Ward, “Workforce Demand Forecasting Techniques,” Human
Resource Planning, vo. 19, no. 1, 1996, pp. 54–55.
2. H. Jantan, A. Hamdan, and Z. Othman, “Classification Tech-
niques for Talent Forecasting in Human Resource Manage-
ment,” Advanced Data Mining and Applications, LNCS 5678,
Springer, 2009, pp. 496–503.
3. N. Nakamura and T. Shingu, “A Model for Recruiting and Train-
ing Decisions in Manpower Planning,” The Int’l J. Production
­Research, vol. 22, no. 1, 1984, pp. 1–15.
4. X. Zhu and H.D. Sherali, “Two-Stage Workforce Planning
­under Demand Fluctuations and Uncertainty,” J. Operational
­Research Soc., 2007, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 94–103.
5. D.A. Goodman, “A Goal Programming Approach to Aggre-
gate Planning of Production and Work Force,” Management
­Science, vol. 20, no. 12, 1974, pp. 1569–1575.
6. A.M. Mouza, “Application of Optimal Control in Man Power
Planning,” Quality & Quantity, vol. 44, no. 2, 2010, pp. 199–215.
7. P.P. Rao, “A Dynamic Programming Approach to Determine
Optimal Manpower Recruitment Policies,” J. Operational
­Research Soc., vol. 40, no. 10, 1990, pp. 983–988.
8. C.M. Khoong, “Some Optimization Models for Manpower
Planning,” Information Knowledge Systems Management,
vol. 1, no. 2, 1999, pp. 159–171.
9. A. Mehlmann, “An Approach to Optimal Recruitment and
Transition Strategy for Manpower System Using Dynamic
­Programming,” J. Operational Research Soc., vol. 31, no. 11,
1980, pp. 1009–1015.
Human
resource
Professional Management
team team
Device
Clerk manager
Three types of Workshop vice
technologists director
Workshop
director
Office
management
position
16/10/13 8:06 PM
 New Freshman
Professional team Skilled team
entry

Outside
Clerk Professional qualifications Skill level
operator
Member level Junior level
engineer
Three types of
technologists
Board
operator Assistant Intermediate
Management team (workshop) engineer level

Device
Management team (office)

manager Engineer Senior level

Vice monitor

Workshop
vice director Senior engineer Technician

Monitor
Workshop Professor senior Senior
director engineer technician

(a) Leave/retire (b) End

Figure 2. Potential employee career paths. (a) Human resource position structure in PM. (b) Human resource grade structure in PM.

value is higher than or equal to the

agent’s expectation, this agent will stay
Employee
in the current grade, or else—judg-
ing by whether the agent is qualified
for promotion conditions—the agent
will get promoted to a certain promo-
N tion rate. The agents promoted success-
Stay in current level If E > P,
fully will reach a higher grade, and the
Y agents not promoted will leave with a
certain separation rate. Generally, the
separation rate is related to the differ-
N If meet
promotion ence between agent’s promotion moti-
qualification? vation and the expected value provided
by the position; the bigger the differ-
Y Promotion rate ence is, the higher the separation rate.

Applications of the
N If
Leave promotion Simulation Model
Separation rate ? After defining the agent’s proper-
Y ties and behaviors, we construct the
simulation model using AnyLogic, a
­
popular agent-based simulation soft-
ware package. To validate the simula-
Promoted to next level tion model, we use the human resource
data of PM with a minor modification
for confidential purposes. We select a
Figure 3. Employee agent’s separation behavior. typical joint workshop in the r­efining

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 Head count Retirement number Leaving number Recruitment number
150 8
145 7
division as the subject of this case 140 6
study and simulate 20 years of its hu- 135 5
man resource development, under the 130 4
condition of three new hires per year 125 3
(which is the workshop’s current re- 120 2
cruitment strategy). The simulation 115 1
model can assist the enterprise with 110 0
the following four types of analyses.

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Human Resource Development
Figure 4. Simulation output of human resource development in next 20 years.
Prediction Around 2021 there’s a retirement peak because of the age imbalance of employees.
The main job of the human resources
department is to predict the change
of human resource development for
New strategy Current strategy
each position, and then fix the cor- 155
responding recruitment or training 150
strategies for the entire company. In 145
our simulation model, each agent will 140
choose its own development route ac- 135
cording to the predefined ­behavioral 130
125
rules. Then, with the simulation of 120
aging, promotion, leaving activities, 115
and so on, we’ll be able to predict the
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As Figure 4 shows, at the beginning
the head count grows steadily. How- Figure 5. Developing changes to the head count under two recruitment strategies.
The new strategy might restrict the head count growth in the near future, but will
ever, around 2021, the head count cause serious understaffing in the long run.
starts to decline rapidly because of
the influence of the retirement peak
and increasing separation. This phe-
nomenon verifies the influence of un- Technician regulation Senior level regulation
balanced ages on the human resource 20
structure. 15

Recruitment Strategy Evaluation 10

Occasionally, managers must pro-
5
pose new recruitment strategies to
match the enterprise’s development 0
plan. Our simulation model is then a
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perfect tool to evaluate such strate-

gies prior to their actual deployment.
For example, PM’s mother company
announces a new regulation that the
total annual recruitment quota must
not exceed 90 percent of the retire-
ment and separation numbers of the
preceding year. Figure 5 compares
the changes in the head count under
the new strategy versus the current
one. ­Under the current recruitment
Figure 6. Changes in the number of monitors under two regulations. If the
company’s regulation requires that the monitor be at the senior level, then the
company’s needs are met, but if the company requires monitors to be qualified as
actual technicians, then there’s a shortage.
strategy, the head count increases both strategies will drop below the
in the beginning and decreases head count requirement (140 peo-
later. For the new recruitment strat- ple), the new strategy quickly leads
egy, the head count fluctuates and to understaffing, which means the
decreases asymptotically. Although
­ new strategy might restrict the head

july/august 2013 www.computer.org/intelligent 105

IS-28-04-Cpss.indd 105 16/10/13 8:06 PM


count growth in the near future, but
will cause serious understaffi ng in
the long run.
Impact Assessment of New
Regulation
New HR regulations usually have
a significant impact on the human
resource structure. For example, a
monitor (a person who leads a session
of the production unit) is required to
be senior level, but when the enterprise
wants to further improve a team’s op-
eration abilities, the monitor’s grade
is required to be at least that of a
technician’s.
Figure 6 compares the changes in
the number of eligible monitors un-
der these two regulations. For the
“senior level” regulation, the moni-
tor number is always above the head
count requirement (16 people), while
for the “technician” regulation, there
won’t be enough eligible monitors at
the latter period of simulation. There-
fore, to avoid a shortage of eligible
monitors, we suggest more training
efforts from the senior level to the
technician level.
In this article, we adopted agent-
based modeling and simulation to
evaluate human resource strate-
gies to assist human resource plan-
ning. The simulation model describes
the properties and behavior rules of
the  human resource management,
with the consideration of the relations
between position promotion, grade,
age, and education.
However, it’s extremely difficult to
quantitatively describe complex hu-
man behavior; further efforts are re-
quired to simulate human behaviors in
a more precise and accurate manner.
On the other hand, the availability of
a simulation model that can evaluate
different alternatives significantly helps
algorithm development in solving the
human resource-planning optimiza-
tion problem.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported partly by the Min-
istry of Technology (MOT) of China grants
2012-364-X03-104 and the National Nat-
ural Science Foundation of China grant
61172105.
yizheng Wang is a master’s student in
the Department of Industrial Engineering
at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Contact him at wangyz1987528@sina.
com.
lefei li is an associate professor in the De-
partment of Industrial Engineering at Tsin-
ghua University in Beijing, China. Contact
him at lilefei@tsinghua.edu.cn.
liuqing yang is an associate professor with
the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at Colorado State University.
Contact her at liuqingyang.ieee@gmail.com.
Selected CS articles and columns
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