This thesis investigates the problem of scheduling and routing employees that are required to perform activities at clients’ locations. Clients request the activities to be performed during a time period. Employees are required to have the skills and qualifications necessary to perform their designated activities. The working time of employees must be respected. Activities could require more th...

We present a multi-objective approach to tackle a real-world nurse scheduling problem using an evolutionary algorithm. The aim is to generate a few good quality non-dominated schedules so that the decision-maker can select the most appropriate one. Our approach is designed around the premise of ‘satisfying individual nurse preferences’ which is of practical significance in our problem. We use f...

In this paper we study a complex real-world workforce scheduling problem. We propose a method of splitting the problem into smaller parts and solving each part using exhaustive search. These smaller parts comprise a combination of choosing a method to select a task to be scheduled and a method to allocate resources, including time, to the selected task. We use reduced Variable Neighbourhood Sea...

We present a computational study on 112 instances of the Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem (WSRP). This problem has applications in many service provider industries where employees visit customers to perform activities. Given their similarity, we adapt a mathematical programming model from the literature on vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) to conduct this computational s...

Based on the situation of the construction and software industry, this paper presents a multi-skilled human resource scheduling model which considers the skill and the salary of the workforce at different levels. It introduces a novel cuckoo search (CS)-based approach to optimize the objective function which combines the minimization of the makespan and the project cost. The proposed approach t...

This paper presents our application of a visualization tool and optimization model based on mixed-integer linear programming to solve a workforce staffing and scheduling problem at Sabena Technics, a major aircraft maintenance company in Belgium. We used the software to generate many alternative, cost-efficient schedules and to analyze multiple scenarios. In several management meetings, stakeho...

In this paper, an integer programming model for the hierarchical workforce problem under the compressed workweeks is developed. The model is based on the integer programming formulation developed by Billionnet [A. Billionnet, Integer programming to schedule a hierarchical workforce with variable demands, European Journal of Operational Research 114 (1999) 105–114] for the hierarchical workforce...

Heavy equipment overhaul facilities such as aircraft service centers and rail-yards face the challenge of minimizing the makespan for a set of preventive maintenance (PM) tasks, requiring singleor multiple-skills, within workforce availability constraints. In this paper, we examine the utility of evolution strategies (ES) to this problem. Comparison of the computational efforts of ES with exhau...

5 Concluding remarks and future prospects 55 Bibliography 57 Introduction Nowadays, enterprises and organizations are faced with increasing demand requirements. On the one hand, it means that they have to provide high quality of service for their customers. On the other hand, they would like to satisfy their employees' demand as much as possible. Thus, companies such as airlines, hospitals, pol...