This paper deals with scheduling complex tasks with an inhomogeneous set of resources. The problem is to assign technicians to tasks with multi-level skill requirements. Here, the requirements are merely the presence of a set of technicians that possess the necessary capabilities. An additional complication is that a set of combined technicians stays together for the duration of a work day. Thi...

BACKGROUND This study examines differences in the factors female and male physicians considered influential in their rural practice location choice and describes the practice arrangements that successfully recruited female physicians to rural areas. METHODS This cross-sectional study was based on a mailed survey of physicians successfully recruited between 1992 and 1999 to towns of 10,000 or ...

We consider a workforce management problem arising in call centers, namely the shift-scheduling problem. It consists in determining the number of agents to be assigned to a set of predefined shifts so as to optimize the trade-off between manpower cost and customer quality of service. We focus on explicitly taking into account in the shift-scheduling problem the uncertainties in the future call ...

The problem studied in this paper was inspired from an actual textile company. The problem is more complex than usual scheduling problems in that we compute overtime requirements and make scheduling decisions simultaneously. Since having tardy jobs is not desirable, we allow overtime to minimize the number of tardy jobs. The overall objective is to maximize profits. We present various mathemati...

This paper describes Patent Number U.S. 8,046,316 B2, titled “Cyclic Combinatorial Method and System”, issued by the US Patents and Trademarks Office on October 25, 2011. The patent is based on a combinatorial algorithm to solve cyclic optimization problems. First, the algorithm identifies cyclically distinct solutions of such problems by enumerating cyclically distinct combinations of the basi...

Call centres are an important tool businesses use to interact with their customers. Their efficiency is especially significant, since long queuing times can reduce customer satisfaction. Assembling the call centre work schedule is a complex task that needs to take various and often mutually conflicting goals into account. In this paper, we present a workforce scheduling system suited for small ...

The min-SHIFT DESIGN problem (MSD) is an important scheduling problem that needs to be solved in many industrial contexts. The issue is to find a minimum number of shifts and the number of employees to be assigned to these shifts in order to minimize the deviation from workforce requirements. Our research considers both theoretical and practical aspects of the min-SHIFT DESIGN problem. This pro...

We study the minimum shift design problem (MSD) that arose in a commercial shift scheduling software project: Given a collection of shifts and workforce requirements for a certain time interval, we look for a minimum cardinality subset of the shifts together with an optimal assignment of workers to this subset of shifts such that the deviation from the requirements is minimum. This problem is c...

This paper proposes a model and algorithm for optimizing staffing and shift scheduling decisions at a 24/7 cybersecurity operations center. We study a two-stage stochastic shift scheduling problem over a 14-day pay period with three shifts per day, several staffing and scheduling constraints, uncertain workloads and on call staffing options. We solve this problem with a heuristic simplification...

This paper reports work done at Star Tribune, a leading metropolitan daily newspaper in Minnesota to improve integration among pressroom, mailroom and distribution operations. This work is subsequent to that already reported in IIE Transactions, which was focused on improving press operations only during the live-runs. An improved size-forecasting model is o€ered which allows preparation of mor...