Assignment of Volunteers in a Sports Event: Case Restricted Fitness by Cut-off Mark

This paper presents a mixed integer linear programming model (MILP) for optimizing the volunteers’ assignment to types of tasks required by the organizers of a sports event. The model takes into account a set of volunteers and their profiles, a set of required tasks, and a set of venues of the event. The main objective is to maximize the global aptitude (Fitness) of the volunteers to perform the tasks on the venues, considering a cut-off mark as lower bound for the selection. The study case is related to the 17th FIBA Basketball World Cup that took place in Spain in 2014. By using the CPLEX solver, the model is exploited and the proposed method can solve instances with nearly 15,000 volunteers, 2148 job positions as a result of 14 types of tasks, and 6 venues, in a CPU time less than 6 s.