A branch-and-price approach for large-scale employee tour scheduling problems

Abstract

We present a new methodology for solving large-scale employee tour scheduling problems. An integer programming model is proposed where tours are decomposed into shifts and start times. This formulation can model complex shift and start time rules for both continuous and discontinuous scheduling problems. A branch-and-price approach is devised to solve this model efficiently. The methodology was tested on the largest tour scheduling problems found in the open literature. In comparison with an alternative implicit model, our approach showed superior computational performance.

Decomposition techniques with mixed integer programming and heuristics for home healthcare planning

“…Decomposition methods have been applied to many problems such as aircraft routing and crew scheduling problem (Cordeau et al 2001;Salazar-González 2014), manpower allocation problem (Dohn et al 2009), employee tour scheduling problem (Ni and Abeledo 2007) and home healthcare scheduling (Rasmussen et al 2012). The principle in traditional decomposition methods is to improve solution bounds (upper and/or lower bound) (Ralphs and Galati 2010).…”

“…2001; Salazar-González 2014), manpower allocation problem (Dohn et al. 2009), employee tour scheduling problem (Ni and Abeledo 2007) and home healthcare scheduling (Rasmussen et al. 2012).…”

Combining Benders decomposition and column generation for multi-activity tour scheduling

“…CG is presented as an interesting method when the introduction of flexibility in the composition of shifts and tours is handled by explicit models that cause a considerable increase in the number of variables (see, e.g., Mehrotra et al [25], Ni and Abeledo [27], Brunner and Stolletz [7]). Although BD appears to be an appropriate method to solve large problems that feature a special block structure, few papers addressing shift and tour scheduling problems with this technique have appeared.…”

Cyclic staff scheduling: optimization models for some real-life problems

“…A comprehensive review work on nurse scheduling is presented by Burke et al (2004), while Gans et al (2003) review studies on telephone call centers. Several variations of the staff scheduling problem can be found in literature, considering: different employees' skills and availability (Loucks and Jacobs (1991)), different contract types (Brusco and Johns (1996), Bard et al (2003)), employees with different productivity levels (Thompson and Goodale (2006)), staff mixed skills and weekend off requirements (Rong (2010)), hierarchical rules (Ulusam Seçkiner et al (2007)), work shifts flexibility in terms of starting-times (Ni and Abeledo (2007)) or in terms of breaks (Bechtold and Jacobs (1990), Rekik et al (2009)), among others.…”