Near optimal and optimal solutions for an integrated employee timetabling and production scheduling problem

This paper deals with integrated employee timetabling and production scheduling problem. At the first level, we have to manage a classical employee timetabling problem. At the second level, we aim at supplying a feasible production schedule for a set of interruptible tasks with qualification requirements and time-windows. Instead of using a hierarchical approach, we try here to integrate the two stages and propose an exact method based on a specific decomposition and a cut generation process to solve the resulting problem. This exact two-stage procedure has the double advantage to converge to optimal solutions but also to find quickly near optimal solutions. The relevance of this approach is discussed here through experimental results.