In industries which employ large numbers of mobile field engineers (resources), there is a need to optimize the task allocation process. This particularly applies to utility companies such as electricity, gas and water suppliers as well as telecommunications. The process of allocating tasks to engineers involves finding the optimum area for each engineer to operate within where the locations av...

This paper describes an actual aircraft maintenance labor scheduling study. The study's objective is to determine the optimum maintenance workforce schedule to satisfy growing labor requirements with minimum cost. The main recommendation of the study is to switch from a five-day to a seven-day workweek for aircraft maintenance workers. A new integer programming formulation, used to obtain an op...

This paper looks at work done on a case-based workforce scheduling application. Generalised patterns of workforce allocation are used to build up a schedule that is then adjusted to remove any problems. Because some constraint elements are incorporated in the case-base, the global problem search space is reduced. The case-base can be maintained either automatically, by generalisation of solutio...

Workforce scheduling has become increasingly important for both the public sector and private companies. Good rosters have many benefits for an organization, such as lower costs, more effective utilization of resources and fairer workloads and distribution of shifts. This paper presents a successful way to roster nurses in an intensive-care unit in a Finnish hospital. The rosters are generated ...

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 ...