Efficient utilization of time and effort is essential in Personnel scheduling problems to evenly balance the workload among the people and attempt to satisfy the personnel preferences. In Constraint Satisfaction Problem based scheduling problems, when a branch of the search fails the backtracking search algorithm back up to the preceding variable and try a different value for it. So here the mo...

Nurse rostering is a complex scheduling problem that affects hospital personnel on a daily basis all over the world. This paper presents a new component-based approach with adaptive perturbations, for a nurse scheduling problem arising at a m ajor UK hospital. The main idea behind this technique is to decompose a schedule into its components (i.e. the allocated shift pattern of each nurse), and...

Bayesian forecasting models provide distributional estimates for random parameters, and relative to classical schemes, have the advantage that they can rapidly capture changes in nonstationary systems using limited historical data. Unlike deterministic optimization, stochastic programs explicitly incorporate distributions for random parameters in the model formulation, and thus have the advanta...

The development of methods for solving real world scheduling problems such as employee rostering requires the extensive domain knowledge of manual rostering experts. Rostering problems are subject to numerous conflicting constraints and are difficult to solve. Automated rostering has attracted the attention of the scientific community over the last three decades, however the systematic represen...

Integer programming can be used to provide solutions to complex decision and planning problems occurring in a wide variety of situations. Applying integer programming to a real life problem basically involves a first phase where a mathematical model is constructed, and a second phase where the problem described by the model is solved. While the nature of the challenges involved in the respectiv...

This paper addresses a multi-activity shift scheduling problem in a continuous and flexible environment including a heterogeneous workforce. Given days-off schedules associated with each employee, our objective is to construct and assign admissible multiactivity shifts to employees on their work days in a way that minimizes under-staffing and over-staffing with a restricted budget on workforce ...

Two ideas taken from Bayesian optimization and classifier systems are presented for personnel scheduling based on choosing a suitable scheduling rule from a set for each person’s assignment. Unlike our previous work of using genetic algorithms whose learning is implicit, the learning in both approaches is explicit, i.e. we are able to identify building blocks directly. To achieve this target, t...

Airlines and their services are very often part of the supply chain in tourism. Therefore, the quality of on-board service contributes to the passengers’ overall satisfaction with the entire journey. Given that the cost of personnel is the second highest component of direct operational costs next to fuel, airlines are more inclined to reduce the level of their workforces rather than to invest i...

To the best of our knowledge, this paper describes the first ant colony optimization (ACO) approach applied to nurse scheduling, analyzing a dynamic regional problem which is currently under discussion at the Vienna hospital compound. Each day, pool nurses have to be assigned for the following days to public hospitals while taking into account a variety of soft and hard constraints regarding wo...