Robust Dynamic Staffing with Predictions

Abstract

We consider a natural dynamic staffing problem in which a decision-maker sequentially hires workers over a finite horizon to meet an unknown demand revealed at the end. Predictions about demand arrive over time and become increasingly accurate, while worker availability decreases. This creates a fundamental trade-off between hiring early to avoid understaffing (when workers are more available but forecasts are less reliable) and hiring late to avoid overstaffing (when forecasts are more accurate but availability is lower). This problem is motivated by last-mile delivery operations, where companies such as Amazon rely on gig-economy workers whose availability declines closer to the operating day. To address practical limitations of Bayesian models (in particular, to remain agnostic to the underlying forecasting method), we study this problem under adversarial predictions. In this model, sequential predictions are adversarially chosen uncertainty intervals that (approximately) contain the true demand. The objective is to minimize worst-case staffing imbalance cost. Our main result is a simple and computationally efficient online algorithm that is minimax optimal. We first characterize the minimax cost against a restricted adversary via a polynomial-size linear program, then show how to emulate this solution in the general case. While our base model focuses on a single demand, we extend the framework to multiple demands (with egalitarian/utilitarian objectives), to settings with costly reversals of hiring decisions, and to inconsistent prediction intervals. We also introduce a practical "re-solving" variant of our algorithm, which we prove is also minimax optimal. Finally we conduct numerical experiments showing that our algorithms outperform Bayesian heuristics in both cost and speed, and are competitive with (approximate or exact) Bayesian-optimal policies when those can be computed.