Nurse Rostering problems represent a subclass of scheduling problems that are hard to solve. Their complexity is due to the large solution spaces and the many objectives and constraints that need to be fulfilled. In this study, we propose a hierarchical method of granulation of problem domain through preprocessing of constraints. A set of zero-cost patterns in the granulated search space provid...

There is considerable interest in the use of genetic algorithms to solve problems arising in the areas of scheduling and timetabling. However, the classical genetic algorithm paradigm is not well equipped to handle the conflict between objectives and constraints that typically occurs in such problems. In order to overcome this, successful implementations frequently make use of problem specific ...

In large airlines, the planning and scheduling of aircrafts and crews is a very important operation. It starts from the analysis of the customers’ demands, passes the stages including timetable construction, fleet planning, and crew pairing, finally ends up with crew rostering. During the past decades, researches had been focused on two complex problems: crew pairing problem and crew rostering ...

We present a new technique (RIIPS) for solving rostering problems in the presence of service uncertainty. RIIPS stands for “Rostering by Iterating Integer Programming and Simulation”. RIIPS allows great complexity of the stochastic system being rostered. This modelling freedom comes at a price, as the approach can be extremely computationally intensive. Therefore any reduction in computational ...

An airline crew rostering problem is a large-scaled and complex optimization problem that assigns crew members to the flight duties while satisfying agreements with the labor union, the government regulations, the carrier’s own policies, and other requirements. The traditional crew rostering problem considers only minimizing the total perdiem in order to reduce the airline expense. This paper p...

Scheduling and rostering problems are among the most common applications of constraint programming. In this thesis, we explore several global constraints for rostering problems. We demonstrate algorithms for efficiently enforcing domain consistency for these constraints, and show empirically that achieving this strongest possible level of consistency is not only of theoretical interest, but als...

A fair allocation of workload to people is crucial for securing job satisfaction. Researchers have introduced numerous objectives and algorithms to represent and improve fairness in personnel rostering problems. These approaches should not ignore the roster quality that is influenced by personnel rostering constraints, such as maximum working times, minimum rest times, etc. The present paper pr...

The problem addressed in this paper is the integrated vehicle-crew-rostering problem (VCRP) aiming to define the schedules for the buses and the rosters for the drivers of a public transit company. The VCRP is described by a bi-objective mixed binary linear programming model with one objective function aggregating vehicle and crew scheduling costs and the other the rostering features. The VCRP ...

We present the problem of planning mobile tours of inspectors on German motorways to enforce the payment of the toll for heavy good trucks. This is a special type of vehicle routing problem with the objective to conduct as good inspections as possible on the complete network. In addition, we developed a personalized crew rostering model, to schedule the crews of the tours. The planning of daily...