Planning and scheduling teams of skilled workers

Solving problems that mix planning and scheduling are often seen as a challenge. Discrete time-based scheduling, along with complex side constraints does not mix well with the more flexible nature of the planning model. This is demonstrated in our experiments when trying to solve a problem where we must assemble teams of skilled workers to perform jobs that require these skills, break these teams and then assemble new ones to perform more jobs. The mixing of the planning part (grouping workers into teams) and the scheduling part (creating a schedule for each worker), along with some difficult side constraints and a large problem size (800 workers, 2000 jobs over one month) combine to contribute to the challenge of finding good solutions for this problem.