A new tabu search procedure for an audit-scheduling problem

Abstract

We consider the following version of the auditing problem. A set of jobs must be processed by auditors A1,...,Am. Each job consists of several tasks and there may be precedence constraints between these tasks. There is a due date associated with each job. Each auditor is available during disjoint time periods. Furthermore, s/he has a minimal and maximal working time. If task i is assigned to an auditor Aj, the processing time is pij and the processing costs are cij. A task assigned to auditor Aj can be preempted only at the end of one of the working periods of Aj. In this case it must be continued at the beginning of the next period. One has to assign the tasks to the auditors and find a feasible schedule for the assigned tasks for each auditor such that the sum of the assignment costs and a weighted sum of tardiness values is minimized. A tabu search procedure for this problem is described and computational results are presented. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Complex Scheduling

“…An RCPSP model for a school timetabling problem can be found in Drexl and Salewski [70], a course scheduling problem at Lufthansa was solved by Haase et al [88]. Solution algorithms for audit-staff scheduling problems were developed in Dodin et al [63] and Brucker and Schumacher [40]. Drexl and Knust [69] present graph-and resource-based models for sports league scheduling problems, a special problem of scheduling a table-tennis league is treated in Knust [116].…”

Activity list representation for a generalization of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

“…In these problems, we may have additional constraints requiring that some pairs of lectures be scheduled simultaneously, or we may formulate the problems as ðRCPSPÞ with multiple modes to account for the fact that the lectures can take place in different types of classrooms. The third timetabling problem mentioned in Brucker and Knust (2001) is the audit-scheduling problem (Brucker and Schumacher, 1999) where the jobs to be audited are the activities and the auditors are the resources. In this problem, each job has a release time and a due date, the execution of the jobs can be pre-empted, and the auditors are available in disjoint time intervals.…”