A stochastic integer programming approach to reserve staff scheduling with preferences

De nos jours, atteindre un niveau élevé de satisfaction des employés à l’intérieur d’horaires efficients est une tâche importante et ardue à laquelle les compagnies font face. Dans ce travail, nous abordons une nouvelle variante du problème de création d’horaire de personnel face à une demande inconnue, en tenant compte de la satisfaction des employés via l’incertitude endogène qui découle de la combinaison des préférences des employés envers les horaires, et de ceux qu’ils reçoivent. Nous abordons ce problème dans le contexte de la création d’horaire d’employés remplaçants, un problème opérationnel de l’industrie du transport en commun qui n’a pas encore été étudié, bien qu’assez présent dans les compagnies nord-américaines. Pour faire face aux défis qu’amènent les deux sources d’incertitude, les absences des employés réguliers et des employés remplaçants, nous modélisons ce problème en un programme stochastique en nombres entiers à deux étapes avec recours mixte en nombres entiers. Les décisions de première étape consistent à trouver les journées de congé des employés remplaçants. Une fois que les absences inconnues des employés réguliers sont révélées, les décisions de deuxième étape consistent à planifier les tâches des employés remplaçants. Nous incorporons les préférences des employés remplaçants envers les journées de congé dans notre modèle pour observer à quel point la satisfaction de ces employés peut affecter leurs propres taux d’absence. Nous validons notre approche sur un an de données de la ville de Los Angeles. Notre travail est présentement en cours d’implémentation chez un fournisseur mondial de solutions logicielles pour les opérations de transport en commun.Nowadays, reaching a high level of employee satisfaction in efficient schedules is an important and difficult task faced by companies. In this work, we tackle a new variant of the personnel scheduling problem under unknown demand by considering employee satisfaction via endogenous uncertainty depending on the combination of their preferred and received schedules. We address this problem in the context of reserve staff scheduling, an operational problem from the transit industry that has not yet been studied, although rather present in North American transit companies. To handle the challenges brought by the two uncertainty sources, regular employee and reserve employee absences, we formulate this problem as a two-stage stochastic integer program with mixed-integer recourse. The first-stage decisions consist in finding the days off of the reserve employees. After the unknown regular employee absences are revealed, the second-stage decisions are to schedule the reserve staff duties. We incorporate reserve employees’ preferences for days off into the model to examine how employee satisfaction may affect their own absence rates. We validate our approach on one year of data from the city of Los Angeles. Our work is currently being implemented in a world-leader software solutions provider for public transit operations

A stochastic integer programming approach to reserve staff scheduling with preferences

Nowadays, reaching a high level of employee satisfaction in efficient schedules is an important and difficult task faced by companies. We tackle a new variant of the personnel scheduling problem under unknown demand by considering employee satisfaction via endogenous uncertainty depending on the combination of their preferred and received schedules. We address this problem in the context of reserve staff scheduling, an unstudied operational problem from the transit industry. To handle the challenges brought by the two uncertainty sources, regular employee and reserve employee absences, we formulate this problem as a two-stage stochastic integer program with mixed-integer recourse. The first-stage decisions consist in finding the days off of the reserve employees. After the unknown regular employee absences are revealed, the second-stage decisions are to schedule the reserve staff duties. We incorporate reserve employees' days-off preferences into the model to examine how employee satisfaction may affect their own absence rates.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, submitted to International Transactions in Operational Researc

The First AI4TSP Competition: Learning to Solve Stochastic Routing Problems

This paper reports on the first international competition on AI for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2021 (IJCAI-21). The TSP is one of the classical combinatorial optimization problems, with many variants inspired by real-world applications. This first competition asked the participants to develop algorithms to solve a time-dependent orienteering problem with stochastic weights and time windows (TD-OPSWTW). It focused on two types of learning approaches: surrogate-based optimization and deep reinforcement learning. In this paper, we describe the problem, the setup of the competition, the winning methods, and give an overview of the results. The winning methods described in this work have advanced the state-of-the-art in using AI for stochastic routing problems. Overall, by organizing this competition we have introduced routing problems as an interesting problem setting for AI researchers. The simulator of the problem has been made open-source and can be used by other researchers as a benchmark for new AI methods.Comment: 21 page