Capacity Planning for Resource Turnaround Operations.

This article focuses on staffing and shift planning decisions for turnaround service capacity in shared-resource operations, with a primary application to hotel housekeeping. It develops a discrete-time stochastic model that captures the trade-off between staffing costs and customer waiting costs caused by the need to clean or service resources (e.g., hotel rooms) between successive uses. Using frameworks of diminishing return (DR) submodularity and M-convexity, the authors establish structural properties of the cost function under different staffing scenarios and propose a heuristic solution method with performance guarantees. A numerical case study based on data from a large city-center hotel demonstrates that allowing room attendants to start shifts later in the day, rather than all starting simultaneously (e.g., at 8:00 a.m.), can nearly eliminate guest waiting after check-in time and improve operational efficiency. The study also explores sensitivity to cleaning durations, workload variations, and room-type heterogeneity, highlighting managerial implications for flexible shift scheduling to reduce idleness and waiting in labor-intensive service operations.