A Comparison of Heuristics for Assigning Individual Employees to Labor Tour Schedules

John Goodale () and Gary Thompson ()

Annals of Operations Research, 2004, vol. 128, issue 1, 47-63

Abstract: The labor tour scheduling literature has focused on the development of schedules, and with a few exceptions, employees were assumed to have identical cost and productivity. Even the few exceptions in the literature that solved tour problems considered employees within a work group to have identical cost and productivity. In this paper we evaluated heuristics for assigning individual employees – who differed in cost and productivity – to labor tour schedules. Our results showed that considering productivity levels when assigning individuals to tours increased profitability. We found that a simple managerial heuristic of assigning individuals in descending order of their productivity to cost ratio was both fast and effective over a broad range of service environmental scenarios. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004

Keywords: individual productivity; labor scheduling; simulated annealing; tour scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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DOI: 10.1023/B:ANOR.0000019098.97205.cc

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