In this paper we investigate the advantages of using Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) to solve personnel rostering problems. Constraints for personnel rostering problems are commonly categorised as either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’. Hard constraints are those which must be satisfied and a roster which violates none of these constraints is considered to be ‘feasible’. Soft constraints are more flexible and are ...

We discuss the self-rostering problem, a concept receiving more and more attention from both theory and practice. We outline our methodology and discuss its application to a number of practical case studies.

SNCF is a large railway transportation company that operates 365 days a year and 24 hours a day. In order to schedule a certain category of workers at train stations and ticket selling points, rosters are designed to cover a cyclical demand. However, the highly combinatorial nature of the rostering problem makes it very difficult to solve it manually, and experts spend a huge amount of time to ...

An attractive mechanism to specify global constraints in rostering and other domains is via formal languages. For instance, the REGULAR and GRAMMAR constraints specify constraints in terms of the languages accepted by an automaton and a context-free grammar respectively. Taking advantage of the fixed length of the constraint, we give an algorithm to transform a context-free grammar into an auto...

In the present study, a large scale, structured problem regarding the routing and rostering of security personnel is investigated. Structured problems are combinatorial optimization problems that encompass characteristics of more than one known problem in operational research. The problem deals with assigning the available personnel to visits associated with a set of customers. This objective j...

The Crew Rostering Problem considers the assignment of the crew staff to a set of pairings covering all the scheduled flights so that operations costs are minimized while its solution must meet hard constraints resulting from the safety regulations of Civil Aviation as well as from the airlines’ internal agreements. Another goal is of the highest interest for airlines: since the overall satisfa...

Crew management is concerned with building the work schedules of crews needed to cover a planned timetable. This is a well-known problem in Operations Research and has been historically associated with airlines and mass-transit companies. More recently, railway applications have also come on the scene, especially in Europe. In practice, the overall crew management problem is decomposed into two...