The Workforce Scheduling Problem (WSP) concerns the scheduling of a multi-skilled workforce to geographically dispersed tasks. An effective solution to the problem is critical to companies’ performance and success. Organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of enhancing employee empowerment and involvement in decision making. However, traditional approaches implemented to t...

Workers scheduling in not highly automated production lines is an important task, especially when in a production line the number of operators is less than the number of workstations. Finding an optimal distribution plan can increase the line throughput, managing the workforce and the workload in a better way. This work focuses on the operator-scheduling problem for an electromechanical assembl...

A multi-objective simulated annealing (MOSA) algorithm is described in this chapter to solve a real maintenance workforce scheduling problem (MWSP) aimed at simultaneously minimizing the workforce cost and maximizing the equipment availability. Heavy industry maintenance facilities at aircraft service centres, railroad yards and steel companies must contend with scheduling Preventive Maintenanc...

This work-in-progress concerns the investigation of a real-world problem of scheduling catering and house keeping workforce in the hospitality industry. The corresponding author of this paper has been involved in a consultancy project with the problem owner for the past 8 months. The application problem described in this paper belongs to the category of problems known to operations research spe...

Discovering hidden patterns in large sets of workforce schedules to gain insight into the potential knowledge in workforce schedules are crucial to better understanding the workforce dispatching decision making process, thereby improve workforce allocation and optimization. In this paper, a conceptual framework of the scheduling pattern discovery system is proposed. Association rule extraction ...

Discovering hidden patterns in large sets of workforce schedules to gain insight into the potential knowledge in workforce schedules are crucial to better understanding the workforce dispatching decision making process, thereby improve workforce allocation and optimization. In this paper, a conceptual framework of the scheduling pattern discovery system is proposed. Association rule extraction ...

Although dynamic programming could ideally solve any combinatorial optimization problem, the curse of dimensionality of the search space seriously limits its application to large optimization problems. For example, only few papers in the literature have reported the application of dynamic programming to workforce scheduling problems. This paper investigates approximate dynamic programming to ta...

preventive maintenance scheduling is to perform a series of tasks that prevents or minimizes production breakdowns and improves the reliability. mathematical models have been developed to solve the preventive maintenance scheduling problem. there are several limitations in the prior work in this area of research. craft combinations are assumed to be given. the craft combination problem concerns...