A Successful Three-Phase Metaheuristic for the Shift Minimization Personal Task Scheduling Problem

Kimmo Nurmi and Nico Kyngäs

Advances in Operations Research, 2021, vol. 2021, 1-12

Abstract:

Workforce scheduling process consists of three major phases: workload prediction, shift generation, and staff rostering. Shift generation is the process of transforming the determined workload into shifts as accurately as possible. The Shift Minimization Personnel Task Scheduling Problem (SMPTSP) is a problem in which a set of tasks with fixed start and finish times must be allocated to a heterogeneous workforce. We show that the presented three-phase metaheuristic can successfully solve the most challenging SMPTSP benchmark instances. The metaheuristic was able to solve 44 of the 47 instances to optimality. The metaheuristic produced the best overall results compared to the previously published methods. The results were generated as a by-product when solving a more complicated General Task-based Shift Generation Problem. The metaheuristic generated comparable results to the methods using commercial MILP solvers as part of the solution process. The presented method is suitable for application in large real-world scenarios. Application areas include cleaning, home care, guarding, manufacturing, and delivery of goods.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/AOR/2021/8876990.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/AOR/2021/8876990.xml (text/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hin:jnlaor:8876990

DOI: 10.1155/2021/8876990

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Advances in Operations Research from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().