This work deals with the Integrated Vehicle and Crew Scheduling Problem (VCSP) in urban mass transit. The Vehicle Scheduling Problem (VSP) consists in creating a daily routine of operation for a fleet of vehicles of a company so that all timetabled trips are covered and the operational costs of such activity reduced, making the best use of the fleet. In the Crew Scheduling Problem (CSP) each cr...

This note summarizes the main results presented in the author’s Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Professor Michel Van Caneghem and defended on 14th June 2005 at University of Aix-Marseille II, France. The thesis, written in French, is available at http://www.lif-sud.univ-mrs.fr/ Rapports/25-2005.html. The mutual exclusion scheduling problem has an elegant graph-theoretic formulation: given an undire...

When technicians are deployed in field service, they must be allocated to the correct assignment and their routes should also be optimised as a part of that process. Data from a practical case of British Telecom has been used widely in the literature to test many different solution methods. This work discusses the modification of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for this problem and compares t...

Cost containment and workforce utilization typically leads to healthcare access regionalization. Little attention has thus been given to patient’s spatial accessibility in appointment scheduling. As a result, many outpatients encounter huge travel burden, especially when the service items are routine. We in this research consider a multi-clinic network. In the current practice, outpatient visit...

Efficient workforce scheduling has an important impact on store profit and customer service. Standard scheduling problems do not recognize the effect of staff availability on customer sales, however, even though the latter is an important factor in the retail sector. In this paper a two-stage model is proposed for this purpose. In the first stage a sales response model is used to specify hourly...

Shift design and break scheduling are important employee scheduling problems that arise in many contexts, especially at airports, call centers, and service industries. The aim is to find a minimum number of legal shifts, the number of workers assigned to them, and a suitable number of breaks so that the deviation from predetermined workforce requirements is minimized. Such problems have been ex...

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. The need for quality software solutions is acute for a number of reasons. In particular, it is very important to efficiently utilise time and effort, to evenly balance the workload among people and to attempt to satisfy personnel preferences. A high quality roster can lead to a m...

Service organizations that operate outside the normal 8-hour day and face wide fluctuations in demand constantly struggle to optimize the size and composition of their workforce. Recent research has shown that improved personnel scheduling methods that take demand uncertainty into account can lead to significant reductions in labor costs. This paper addresses a staff planning and scheduling pro...

In a warehouse environment, tasks appear dynamically. Consequently, task management system that matches them with the workforce too early (e.g., weeks in advance) is necessarily sub-optimal. Also, rapidly increasing size of action space such consists significant problem for traditional schedulers. Reinforcement learning, however, suited to deal issues requiring making sequential decisions towar...