Manpower Allocation with Time Windows and Job Teaming Constraints

In the Manpower Allocation Problem with Time Windows and Job-Teaming Constraints (MAPTWTC), we have a set of jobs located at various locations where each job requires a team of workers. Each job has a time window and a job duration, during which everyone on the team has to be present. The job requirement is satisfied if and only if the required composite team works for long enough duration within the job's time window. The objective of the problem is find a schedule to minimize a weighted sum of the total number of workers, the total travelling distances of all workers and their total waiting time. Two main approaches are proposed in the paper which are shown to be able to obtain very good performance

A survey of workforce scheduling and routing

In the context of workforce scheduling, there are many scenarios in which personnel must carry out tasks at different locations hence requiring some form of transportation. Examples of these type of scenarios include nurses visiting patients at home, technicians carrying out repairs at customers' locations, security guards performing rounds at different premises, etc. We refer to these scenarios as Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems (WSRP) as they usually involve the scheduling of personnel combined with some form of routing in order to ensure that employees arrive on time to the locations where tasks need to be performed. This kind of problems have been tackled in the literature for a number of years. This paper presents a survey which attempts to identify the common attributes of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods applied when tackling these problems. Our longer term aim is to achieve an in-depth understanding of how to model and solve workforce scheduling and routing problems and this survey represents the first step in this quest

A survey of workforce scheduling and routing

In the context of workforce scheduling, there are many scenarios in which personnel must carry out tasks at different locations hence requiring some form of transportation. Examples of these type of scenarios include nurses visiting patients at home, technicians carrying out repairs at customers' locations, security guards performing rounds at different premises, etc. We refer to these scenarios as Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems (WSRP) as they usually involve the scheduling of personnel combined with some form of routing in order to ensure that employees arrive on time to the locations where tasks need to be performed. This kind of problems have been tackled in the literature for a number of years. This paper presents a survey which attempts to identify the common attributes of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods applied when tackling these problems. Our longer term aim is to achieve an in-depth understanding of how to model and solve workforce scheduling and routing problems and this survey represents the first step in this quest

Workforce scheduling and routing problems: literature survey and computational study

In the context of workforce scheduling, there are many scenarios in which personnel must carry out tasks at different locations hence requiring some form of transportation. Examples of these type of scenarios include nurses visiting patients at home, technicians carrying out repairs at customers’ locations and security guards performing rounds at different premises, etc. We refer to these scenarios as workforce scheduling and routing problems (WSRP) as they usually involve the scheduling of personnel combined with some form of routing in order to ensure that employees arrive on time at the locations where tasks need to be performed. The first part of this paper presents a survey which attempts to identify the common features of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods applied when tackling these problems. The second part of the paper presents a study on the computational difficulty of solving these type of problems. For this, five data sets are gathered from the literature and some adaptations are made in order to incorporate the key features that our survey identifies as commonly arising in WSRP scenarios. The computational study provides an insight into the structure of the adapted test instances, an insight into the effect that problem features have when solving the instances using mathematical programming, and some benchmark computation times using the Gurobi solver running on a standard personal computer

Personaneinsatz- und Tourenplanung für Mitarbeiter mit Mehrfachqualifikationen

In workforce routing and scheduling there are many applications in which differently skilled workers must perform jobs that occur at different locations, where each job requires a particular combination of skills. In many such applications, a group of workers must be sent out to provide all skills required by a job. Examples are found in maintenance operations, the construction sector, health care operations, or consultancies. In this thesis, we analyze the combined problem of composing worker groups (teams) and routing these teams under goals expressing service-, fairness-, and cost-objectives. We develop mathematical optimization models and heuristic solution methods for an integrated solution and a sequential solution of the teaming- and routing-subproblems . Computational experiments are conducted to identify the tradeoff of better solution quality and computational effort

Computational study for workforce scheduling and routing problems

We present a computational study on 112 instances of the Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem (WSRP). This problem has applications in many service provider industries where employees visit customers to perform activities. Given their similarity, we adapt a mathematical programming model from the literature on vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) to conduct this computational study on the WSRP. We generate a set of WSRP instances from a well-known VRPTW data set. This work has three objectives. First, to investigate feasibility and optimality on a range of medium size WSRP instances with different distribution of visiting locations and including teaming and connected activities constraints. Second, to compare the generated WSRP instances to their counterpart VRPTW instances with respect to their difficulty. Third, to determine the computation time required by a mathematical programming solver to find feasible solutions for the generated WSRP instances. It is observed that although the solver can achieve feasible solutions for some instances, the current solver capabilities are still limited. Another observation is the WSRP instances present an increased degree of difficulty because of the additional constraints. The key contribution of this paper is to present some test instances and corresponding benchmark study for the WSRP

Computational study for workforce scheduling and routing problems

We present a computational study on 112 instances of the Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem (WSRP). This problem has applications in many service provider industries where employees visit customers to perform activities. Given their similarity, we adapt a mathematical programming model from the literature on vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) to conduct this computational study on the WSRP. We generate a set of WSRP instances from a well-known VRPTW data set. This work has three objectives. First, to investigate feasibility and optimality on a range of medium size WSRP instances with different distribution of visiting locations and including teaming and connected activities constraints. Second, to compare the generated WSRP instances to their counterpart VRPTW instances with respect to their difficulty. Third, to determine the computation time required by a mathematical programming solver to find feasible solutions for the generated WSRP instances. It is observed that although the solver can achieve feasible solutions for some instances, the current solver capabilities are still limited. Another observation is the WSRP instances present an increased degree of difficulty because of the additional constraints. The key contribution of this paper is to present some test instances and corresponding benchmark study for the WSRP