Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
10348030 | Computers & Operations Research | 2013 | 16 Pages |
Abstract
This paper presents an industrial problem which arises in a company specialized in drug evaluation and pharmacology research. The aim is to build employee timetables covering the demand given by a set of fixed tasks. The optimality criterion concerns the equity of the workload sharing. A solution to this problem is the assignment of all tasks whose resulting working shifts respect tasks requirements as well as legal and organizational constraints. Scheduling problems usually consider a fixed set of shifts which have to be assigned to a given number of employees whereas in our problem shifts are not fixed and are deduced from the task assignment. In the following, we refer to this problem as the shift-design personnel task scheduling problem with an equity criterion (SDPTSP-E), in reference to the shift minimization personnel task scheduling problem (SMPTSP). Even if the SDPTSP-E is related to several problems, none of them allow to grasp its full complexity. Consequently, we propose a dedicated method based on constraint programming. Several branching and exploration strategies are proposed and tested.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Computer Science
Computer Science (General)
Authors
Tanguy Lapègue, Odile Bellenguez-Morineau, Damien Prot,