An Improved Memetic Algorithm for Break Scheduling

Automated Shift Design and Break Scheduling

“…The break scheduling problem that imposes same constraints for breaks defined in this chapter has been investigated in [5,26,20,31,30]. Beer et al [5] applied a min-conflict based heuristic to solve this problem.…”

“…Beer et al [5] also introduce real life benchmark instances containing shifts that include more than 10 breaks. The results presented in [5] have been further improved by memetic algorithms proposed in [20,31,30]. A similar break scheduling problem, which origins in call centers and includes also meetings and some slightly changed constraints, has been described in [4] and [26].…”

“…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.…”

A Hybrid LS-CP Solver for the Shifts and Breaks Design Problem

“…The break scheduling problem that imposes same constraints for breaks defined in this paper has been investigated in [5,20,14]. Beer et al [5] applied a min-conflict based heuristic to solve this problem.…”

“…Shift and break assignment problems may differ in constraints and objectives and are referred in the literature with different names as shift design [9,13], shift scheduling [3,4,17,19], and break scheduling [5,14,20]. Such problems arise in airports, call centers, and service industry in general and have been extensively investigated in Operations Research and recently have been also tackled with AI techniques.…”