A comparative evaluation of modeling approaches to the labor shift scheduling problem

Aykin, Turgut

doi:10.1016/s0377-2217(99)00413-0

Cited by 77 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…For large call centers with a single queue of call arrivals and a homogeneous pool of agents, each with several possible shift and break combinations and associated restrictions, the size of the mathematical program grows very rapidly. This issue is addressed by several researchers, most notably Aykin (1996Aykin ( , 2000, who models flexible break constraints for each shift and tests the proposed methodology with several large test problems.…”

Section: Personnel Planning: Resource Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

Akşin

Armony

Mehrotra

2007

Production and Operations Management

616

515

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C all centers are an increasingly important part of today's business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research.In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.

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Section: Personnel Planning: Resource Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

Akşin

Armony

Mehrotra

2007

Production and Operations Management

616

515

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“…Breaks are only modelled implicitly and the resulting formulation therefore has a much smaller size than the classical set covering model for the same problem. A comparison of some of the different modelling approaches can be found in Aykin (2000). Computational tests show that the model based on Aykin (1996) is superior to the approach suggested in Bechtold and Jacobs (1990).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Benders Decomposition-Based Matheuristic for the Cardinality Constrained Shift Design Problem

2015

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The Shift Design Problem is an important optimization problem which arises when scheduling personnel in industries that require continuous operation. Based on the forecast, required staffing levels for a set of time periods, a set of shift types that best covers the demand must be determined. A shift type is a consecutive sequence of time periods that adheres to legal and union rules and can be assigned to an employee on any day. In this paper we introduce the Cardinality Constrained Shift Design Problem; a variant of the Shift Design Problem in which the number of permitted shift types is bounded by an upper limit. We present an Integer Programming model for this problem and show that it's structure lends itself very naturally to Benders decomposition. Due to convergence issues with a conventional implementation, we propose a matheuristic based on Benders decomposition for solving the problem. Furthermore, we argue that an important step in this approach is finding dual alternative optimal solutions to the Benders subproblems and describe an approach to obtain a diverse set of these. Numerical tests show that the described methodology significantly outperforms a commercial Mixed Integer Programming solver on instances with 1241 different shift types and remains competitive for larger cases with 2145 shift types. On all classes of problems the heuristic is able to quickly find good solutions.

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“…Integer programming formulations for shift scheduling include [3], [29], and [1]. Aykin [1] introduced an implicit integer programming model for the shift scheduling problem in 1996 and later he compared an extended version [2] of his previous model with a similarly extended formulation introduced by Bechtold and Jacobs [3]. He observed that Bechtold and Jacobs' approach needed fewer variables whereas his approach needed fewer constraints.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Shift design and break assignment problems are known also under other names, for example as shift design [19,10], shift scheduling [3,2,25,28], and break scheduling [4,5,20,31]. Such problems arise at airports, call centers, and in the service industry in general, and have been extensively investigated in Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated Shift Design and Break Scheduling

Gaspero

Gärtner²,

Musliu

et al. 2013

Studies in Computational Intelligence

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Shift design and break scheduling are important employee scheduling problems that arise in many contexts, especially at airports, call centers, and service industries. The aim is to find a minimum number of legal shifts, the number of workers assigned to them, and a suitable number of breaks so that the deviation from predetermined workforce requirements is minimized. Such problems have been extensively investigated in Operations Research and recently have been also tackled with Artificial Intelligence techniques. In this chapter we outline major characteristics of these problems and provide a literature survey over solution techniques to solve them. We then describe in detail two state-of-the-art approaches based on local search techniques. Finally, we discuss our experiences with the application of one of these techniques in a real life case study.

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A comparative evaluation of modeling approaches to the labor shift scheduling problem

Cited by 77 publications

References 15 publications

The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

A Benders Decomposition-Based Matheuristic for the Cardinality Constrained Shift Design Problem

Automated Shift Design and Break Scheduling

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