..................................................................................................................xi 1 SMEs and the Defense Industrial Base..........................................................1 2 TIDE Program: Charter and Activities ............................................................3 2.1 The TIDE Mission ...............................................................

The typical process of planning and scheduling a rotating workforce in an organization consists in designing shifts and then assigning employees to these shifts and to periods of rest (days-off). Successfully solving these problems has high practical relevance: Results from ergonomics indicate that shift schedules have a profound impact on the health and satisfaction of employees as well as on ...

Crowdsourcing has emerged as an important paradigm in human-problem solving techniques on the Web. One application of crowdsourcing is to outsource certain tasks to the crowd that are difficult to implement as solutions based on software services only. Another benefit of crowdsourcing is the on-demand allocation of a flexible workforce. Businesses may outsource certain tasks to the crowd based ...

The workforce scheduling and routing problem (WSRP) is a combinatorial optimisation problem where a set of workers must perform visits to geographically scattered locations. We present a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic algorithm to tackle this problem, incorporating two novel heuristics tailored to the problem-domain. The first heuristic restricts the search space using a prio...

The purpose of this paper is to present a full-scale model of the tour scheduling problem as it arises in the United States Postal Service, and to examine several scenarios aimed at reducing the size of the workforce. The problem is formulated as a pure integer linear program and solved with CPLEX. The baseline model includes both full-time and part-time workers, as well as the principal constr...

We present a mixed integer programming decomposition approach to tackle workforce scheduling and routing problems (WSRP) that involve time-dependent activities constraints. The proposed method is called repeated decomposition with conflict repair (RDCR) and it consists of repeatedly applying a phase of problem decomposition and sub-problem solving, followed by a phase dedicated to conflict repa...

Widespread public demand for improved access, political pressure for shorter wait times, a stretched workforce, an aging population and overutilized equipment and facilities challenge healthcare leaders to adopt new management approaches. This paper highlights the significant benefits that can be achieved by applying operations research (OR) methods to healthcare management. It shows how queuin...

In this paper, we show how an Extended Guided Local Search can be applied to the Quadratic Assignment Problem and show the extensions can improve its performance. GLS is a general, penalty-based meta-heuristic, which sits on top of local search algorithms, to help guide them out of local minima. GLS has been shown to be successful in solving a number of practical real life problems, such as the...