I am trying to set up a MILP for production scheduling. The specific details I'm not sure are important but in general a plant has M machines running N parts, each part requiring W workers. The model runs over S shifts (usually over 5 day or 10 day modelling periods).
One key feature is it's preferable for the amount of workers to stay relatively constant. One way we have thought to do this is to just put constraints on the minimum and maximum number of workers and adjusting those as tight as we can. The downside to that is that we would need to re-run the model and adjust the parameters.
However, I was wondering if there is a way to somehow quantify either the standard deviation (preferable) or the range (less preferable but still appreciated) of the number of workers per shift such that the model remains a MILP?