An assessment of a days off decomposition approach to personnel shift scheduling

Sophie Veldhoven (), Gerhard Post (), Egbert Veen () and Tim Curtois ()
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Sophie Veldhoven: Aviv
Gerhard Post: University of Twente
Egbert Veen: University of Twente
Tim Curtois: University of Nottingham

Annals of Operations Research, 2016, vol. 239, issue 1, No 12, 207-223

Abstract: Abstract This paper studies a two-phase decomposition approach to solving the personnel scheduling problem. The first phase creates a days-off-schedule, indicating working days and days off for each employee. The second phase assigns shifts to the working days in the days-off-schedule. This decomposition is motivated by the fact that personnel scheduling constraints are often divided into two categories: one specifies constraints on working days and days off, while the other specifies constraints on shift assignments. To assess the consequences of the decomposition approach, we apply it to public benchmark instances, and compare this to solving the personnel scheduling problem directly. In all steps we use mathematical programming. We also study the extension that includes night shifts in the first phase of the decomposition. We present a detailed results analysis, and analyze the effect of various instance parameters on the decompositions’ results. In general, we observe that the decompositions significantly reduce the computation time, but the quality, though often good, depends strongly on the instance at hand. Our analysis identifies which aspects in the instance can jeopardize the quality.

Keywords: Personnel scheduling; Days off scheduling; Decomposition; Mathematical programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-014-1674-7

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