The impact of reserve duties on the robustness of a personnel shift roster: An empirical investigation

Employee substitutability as a tool to improve the robustness in personnel scheduling

“…The general methodology of validating the proactively obtained robustness by imitating the reactive operational phase is similar to the approach of Abdelghany et al (2008), and Ingels and Maenhout (2015). In the remainder of this paper, a personnel shift roster refers to the set of employee schedules for the complete workforce and an employee schedule represents the line-of-work of an individual employee.…”

“…First, more skilled employees are assigned to the specific duty than minimum required and a capacity buffer is created. The appropriate buffer size and positioning of capacity buffers has been investigated by Ingels and Maenhout (2015). Second, a higher number of skilled employees is attained by assigning multi-skilled employees to other skillduties during the same shift.…”

“…The introduction of reserve duties as a means to improve robustness has been widely studied in the airline industry given that unforeseen demand (uncertainty of demand) (Dillon and Kontogiorgis 1999), employee sickness (uncertainty of capacity) (Dillon and Kontogiorgis 1999;Moudani and Mora-Camino 2010), technical failures (uncertainty of capacity) (Rosenberger et al 2002;Sohoni et al 2006) and unexpected task delays due to adverse weather conditions or unscheduled maintenance (uncertainty of arrival) (Sohoni et al 2006) may lead to severe and costly delays. Similarly, reserve duties are investigated in the context of the railway crew rescheduling problem as a reaction to uncertainty of infrastructure capacity (Potthoff et al 2010) and in the context of the personnel shift scheduling problem to deal with uncertainty of demand and capacity (Ingels and Maenhout 2015). Ingels and Maenhout (2015) consider a personnel shift scheduling problem with a homogeneous workforce and aim to improve the stability of a roster by introducing reserve duties.…”

“…Similarly, reserve duties are investigated in the context of the railway crew rescheduling problem as a reaction to uncertainty of infrastructure capacity (Potthoff et al 2010) and in the context of the personnel shift scheduling problem to deal with uncertainty of demand and capacity (Ingels and Maenhout 2015). Ingels and Maenhout (2015) consider a personnel shift scheduling problem with a homogeneous workforce and aim to improve the stability of a roster by introducing reserve duties. The definition of preferred staffing requirements is another way to install staff buffers.…”

“…These phases solve distinct parts of the original problem and differ in the constraints and/or objectives they consider. Decomposition is applied in solution methodologies such as pre-emptive programming (Topaloglu and Ozkarahan 2004), branch-and-bound (Trivedi and Warner 1976), column generation and branch-and-price (Ingels and Maenhout 2015;Maenhout and Vanhoucke 2010).…”