A (0–1) goal programming model for scheduling the tour of a marketing executive

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling the tour of a marketing executive (ME) of a large electronics manufacturing company in India. In this problem, the ME has to visit a number of customers in a given planning period. The scheduling problem taken up in this study is different from the various personnel scheduling problems addressed in the literature. This type of personnel scheduling problem can be observed in many other situations such as periodical visits of inspection officers, tour of politicians during election campaigns, tour of mobile courts, schedule of mobile stalls in various areas, etc. In this paper the tour scheduling problem of the ME is modeled using (0–1) goal programming (GP). The (0–1) GP model for the data provided by the company for 1 month has 802 constraints and 1167 binary variables. The model is solved using LINDO software package. The model takes less than a minute (on a 1.50 MHz Pentium machine with 128 MB RAM) to get a solution of the non-preemptive version and about 6 days for the preemptive version. The main contribution is in problem definition and development of the mathematical model for scheduling the tour.