A survey on constructing rosters for air traffic controllers

In this survey the state-of-the-art technology and the literature to date are discussed. In particular, we will discuss the gap in the literature concerning rostering staff to tasks by qualifications, with the inclusion of restrictions on a measure of task familiarity, which is a unique consequence of the structure of ATC operations

Rostering air traffic controllers.

Many, if not most, real world scheduling problems fall into the class of NP. Classical, mathematically exact methods when applied to these problems often suffer from scaling issues, that prevent the computation of a solution in reasonable time. Similarly, real world problems can often be characterised by the requirement to dynamically change any prebuilt roster in reaction to unforeseen changes to the resources available, such as short notice staff absence or a change in the requirements of the task to be fulfilled. Metaheuristic methods have been successfully used to make approximations to optimal solutions which are good enough for practical use. In this paper an example of a novel and complex employee scheduling, or rostering, problem will be discussed and a simple metaheuristic method demonstrated to solve the problem.N/

Scheduling air traffic controllers

The effective rostering of Air Traffic Controllers is a complex and under researched area of the personnel scheduling literature. An effective method to produce real world rosters for controllers requires the ability to model shifts, breaks, multiple tasks and their associated qualifications, to rotate staff through all the tasks for which they are qualified to maintain skill levels, the requirement to train staff whilst continuing normal operations and an ability to reroster in the event of unexpected events. Examples in the literature that examine some of these components include shift scheduling, break planning and multi skilled staff. We shall present an algorithm that can effectively model many of the features of the ATC rostering problem, and produce useful real world rosters for operational use