An Interactive Audit-Staff Scheduling Decision Support System

An optimization model for the audit-staff scheduling decisions faced by public accounting firms is developed in this paper. The model is an integer programming model designed to assign audit-staff to audit engagements in the most effective way. It is shown how the model can be incorporated into a decision support system for audit-staff scheduling. Other components of the decision support system include a judgmental scheduling system and a data base containing relevant scheduling information. The interrelationship between these components is described in detail. Finally, the optimization model is compared with other models which have been developed for this decision.