scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Journal ArticleDOI

Workforce scheduling and routing problems: literature survey and computational study

01 Apr 2016-Annals of Operations Research (Springer US)-Vol. 239, Iss: 1, pp 39-67
TL;DR: A survey is presented which attempts to identify the common features of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods applied when tackling these problems and a study on the computational difficulty of solving these type of problems is presented.
Abstract: In the context of workforce scheduling, there are many scenarios in which personnel must carry out tasks at different locations hence requiring some form of transportation. Examples of these type of scenarios include nurses visiting patients at home, technicians carrying out repairs at customers’ locations and security guards performing rounds at different premises, etc. We refer to these scenarios as workforce scheduling and routing problems (WSRP) as they usually involve the scheduling of personnel combined with some form of routing in order to ensure that employees arrive on time at the locations where tasks need to be performed. The first part of this paper presents a survey which attempts to identify the common features of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods applied when tackling these problems. The second part of the paper presents a study on the computational difficulty of solving these type of problems. For this, five data sets are gathered from the literature and some adaptations are made in order to incorporate the key features that our survey identifies as commonly arising in WSRP scenarios. The computational study provides an insight into the structure of the adapted test instances, an insight into the effect that problem features have when solving the instances using mathematical programming, and some benchmark computation times using the Gurobi solver running on a standard personal computer.

Summary (2 min read)

1 Introduction

  • In recent times, employees often need to be more flexible regarding the type of jobs they perform and similarly, employers need to make compromises in order to 1 Moreover, in some cases workforce should perform tasks at different locations, e.g. nurses visiting patients at their home, and technicians carrying out repairs at different companies, etc.
  • The authors are interested in those workforce scheduling problems in which personnel is considered flexible (in terms of tasks and working times) and mobile (travelling is required in order to do the job).
  • In each subsection of Section 4 the authors also review the different solution techniques (optimisation, heuristics and hybrid approaches) that have been used to tackle these problems.

2 Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems

  • 1 Description of the Problem Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem (WSRP) refers to those scenarios involving the mobilisation of personnel in order to perform work related activities at different locations.
  • The number of activities varies depend- ing on the duration of the working shift, but assuming that each activity needs to be performed at a different location, a routing problem also arises.
  • The authors include the characteristics that appear the most in the literature.
  • Matching employees’ skills to the tasks assigned has been tackled for complex organisations (Cordeau et al, 2010).
  • A maximum difference dependency establishes a limit for the start on the second activity from the end of the first activity.

3 Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

  • The routing part in many of the problems considered here as examples of WSRP is based on the vehicle routing problem with time windows .
  • The delivery vehicle must arrive at the location within that specified time window.
  • Extensions of the VRPTW include other features such as multiple trips, multiple depots and synchronisation of vehicles.
  • This applies to the case when employees could perform more than one trip on a day to visit the same location.
  • Other researchers use hybrid methods that employ heuristics for the generation of columns within a column generation setting (Bredström and Rönnqvist, 2008) or use heuristics to improve an initial solution found with mathematical programming (Fischetti et al, 2004).

4 Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems in the Literature

  • In this section the authors review some of the problems tackled in the literature that can be considered as a type of workforce scheduling and routing problem (WSRP).
  • Additionally, nurses have time limitations on the number of working hours per day or the starting and ending time.
  • Additional features of home care include prioritising visits.
  • Other methods include hyperheuristics Misir et al (2010).
  • Some telecommunication companies require scheduling employees to perform a series of installation and maintenance jobs, e.g. Cordeau et al (2010).

5 Computational Study

  • As the above survey reveals, workforce scheduling and routing problems (WSRP) arise in a variety of scenarios.
  • Figure 1 gives an insight into the performance of the solver in one of instances of size 25 for which the optimal solution was found.
  • Instances in the considered data sets have a range of time window sizes.
  • Then on average, activities in the Mov, Sec and Sol instances require more than 1 employee and this is illustrated in Figure 11.
  • In the procedure to generate connected activities the authors needed to consider the already given time windows for each activity.

6 Conclusion

  • A workforce scheduling and routing problem (WSRP) refers to any environment in which a skilled diverse workforce should be scheduled to perform a series of activities distributed over geographically different locations.
  • The problems identified include but are not limited to: home health care, home care, scheduling of technicians, security personnel routing and rostering, and manpower allocation.
  • The survey part of this paper also sought to identify the solution methods that have been employed in the literature when tackling WSRP scenarios.
  • The authors acknowledge the authors (Castro-Gutierrez et al, 2011; Rasmussen et al, 2012; Misir et al, 2011; Günther and Nissen, 2012) who kindly provided us the original data sets to perform this study.

Did you find this useful? Give us your feedback

Figures (19)

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

myjournal manuscript No.
(will be inserted by the editor)
Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems
Literature Survey and Computational Study
J. Arturo Castillo-Salazar
1
,
Dario Landa-Silva, Rong Qu
Received: date / Accepted: date
Abstract In the context of workforce scheduling, there are many scenarios in
which personnel must carry out tasks at different locations hence requiring some
form of transportation. Examples of these type of scenarios include nurses visit-
ing patients at home, technicians carrying out repairs at customers’ locations and
security guards performing rounds at different premises, etc. We refer to these
scenarios as Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems (WSRP) as they usu-
ally involve the scheduling of personnel combined with some form of routing in
order to ensure that employees arrive on time at the locations where tasks need
to be performed. The first part of this paper presents a survey which attempts to
identify the common features of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods ap-
plied when tackling these problems. The second part of the paper presents a study
on the computational difficulty of solving these type of problems. For this, five
data sets are gathered from the literature and some adaptations are made in order
to incorporate the key features that our survey identifies as commonly arising in
WSRP scenarios. The computational study provides an insight into the structure
of the adapted test instances, an insight into the effect that problem features have
when solving the instances using mathematical programming, and some bench-
mark computation times using the Gurobi solver running on a standard personal
computer.
Keywords workforce scheduling, employee rostering, routing problems, mobile
workforce, mathematical programming, benchmark instances
1 Introduction
In recent times, employees often need to be more flexible regarding the type of
jobs they perform and similarly, employers need to make compromises in order to
1
The author acknowledges CONACYT for its financial support
J. Arturo Castillo-Salazar · Dario Landa-Silva · Rong Qu
E-mail: {psxjaca, dario.landasilva, rong.qu}@nottingham.ac.uk
ASAP Research Group, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Cam-
pus, Wollaton Road, Nottingham, United Kingdom, NG8 1BB

J. Arturo Castillo-Salazar et al
retain their best employees (Eaton, 2003; Mart´ınez-S´anchez et al, 2007). Moreover,
in some cases workforce should perform tasks at different locations, e.g. nurses
visiting patients at their home, and technicians carrying out repairs at different
companies, etc. Therefore, the scheduling of workforce with ‘flexible’ arrangements
and ‘mobility’ is of great importance in many scenarios. Many types of personnel
scheduling problems have been tackled in the literature (Baker, 1976; Miller, 1976;
Golembiewski and Proehl Jr, 1978; Cheang et al, 2003; Ernst et al, 2004; Alfares,
2004). We are interested in those workforce scheduling problems in which personnel
is considered flexible (in terms of tasks and working times) and mobile (travelling
is required in order to do the job). By mobility we refer specifically to those cases
in which moving from one location to another takes significant time and therefore
reducing the travel time could potentially increase productivity. To some extent,
this problem combines features from the general employee scheduling problem and
also from vehicle routing problems. The survey and computational study presented
here represent a step towards our longer term aim of formulating and tackling the
problem of scheduling flexible and mobile workforce. In the rest of this paper, we
refer to this as the workforce scheduling and routing problem (WSRP).
In Section 2 we describe the WSRP and identify some of the main character-
istics of this type of workforce scheduling problems. Section 3 is dedicated to the
vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) because it represents the
basic routing component of many of the problems discussed in this survey. Sec-
tion 4 outlines some workforce scheduling scenarios that have been investigated
in the literature and that in our view present a case of WSRP. Examples include
home care, scheduling of technicians, manpower allocation, etc. In each subsec-
tion of Section 4 we also review the different solution techniques (optimisation,
heuristics and hybrid approaches) that have been used to tackle these problems.
Section 5 contains the computational study. The experiments are performed using
the Gurobi solver, IP and MIP models. A set of problem instances are also pre-
sented in this section. Finally, Section 6 summarises our findings and outlines the
next steps in our research into workforce scheduling and routing.
2 Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems
2.1 Description of the Problem
Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem (WSRP) refers to those scenarios in-
volving the mobilisation of personnel in order to perform work related activities at
different locations. In such scenarios, employees use diverse means of transporta-
tion, e.g. walking, car, public transport, bicycle, etc. Also, in these scenarios there
are more than one activity to be performed in a day, e.g. nurses visiting patients
at their homes to administer medication or provide treatment (Cheng and Rich,
1998), care workers aiding members of the community to perform difficult tasks
(Eveborn et al, 2006), technicians carrying out repairs and installations (Cordeau
et al, 2010), and security guards performing night rounds on several premises
(Misir et al, 2011). The number of activities across the different locations is usu-
ally larger than the number of employees available, hence employees should travel
between locations to perform the work. This results into combination of employee
scheduling and vehicle routing problems. The number of activities varies depend-

Workforce Scheduling and Routing (WSRP)
ing on the duration of the working shift, but assuming that each activity needs to
be performed at a different location, a routing problem also arises. A route is a
sequence of locations that need to be visited (Raff, 1983) but we exclude problems
in which workers need to move across work stations within the same factory for
example. Work activities which need to be performed within a given time require
scheduling in addition to routing. Tackling WSRP scenarios could potentially in-
volve many objectives like: reducing employees travel time, guaranteeing tasks to
be performed by qualified people only, reducing the cost of hiring casual staff,
ensuring contracted employees are used efficiently, etc.
We assume employees should rather spend more time doing work than travel-
ling, particularly in settings in which travelling time is counted as paid working
time, hence reducing travel time is valuable (Fosgerau and Engelson, 2011; Jara-
D´ıaz, 2000). Like in many workforce scheduling problems, the set of skills that
an employee has for performing a task is of great importance in WSRP scenarios
(Cordeau et al, 2010) so that employees perform activities at customer premises
more efficiently. Many papers in the literature assume that the workforce is ho-
mogeneous regarding skills but in many scenarios, a diverse set of skills is the
predominant environment. We should note that scenarios like the pick-up and de-
livery of goods (parcels) is not considered here as a WSRP because no significant
‘work’ (in terms of time) is carried out at customers’ premises. Although, one could
argue that the action of delivering a parcel is a task, it does not take a significant
amount of time once the worker gets to the destination. This type of pick-up and
delivery problems are usually defined as routing problems and are not covered in
our study of workforce scheduling and routing problems.
2.2 Main Characteristics
We outline here the main characteristics of WSRP. Some of these characteristics
are ‘obvious’ since they are in the nature of the problem while others were identified
during our survey. We include the characteristics that appear the most in the
literature.
Time Windows for performing a task (duty, job) at a customer premises. It is as-
sumed that employees can start the work as soon as they arrive at the location.
Time windows can be flexible or tight and in accordance to contractual arrange-
ments. In some cases, no time window is defined as employees work based on
annualised hours. Also, in some cases employees can benefit from over-time
payment, making compliance with the time window a soft constraint.
Transportation Modality refers to employees using different means like car, bicycle,
walking or public transport. We assume that time and cost of transportation
is not the same for each employee.
Start and End Locations can be from one location, where all employees start at the
main office (Eveborn et al, 2006), up to many locations (perhaps as many as
the number of employees) assuming each employee may start from their home.
In some cases company’s policy enforces employees starting their working time
at the main office but returning home directly after the last job performed.
Skills and Qualifications act as filters on who can perform a task and there are two
main cases. 1) All employees have the same skills and qualifications so anyone

J. Arturo Castillo-Salazar et al
can perform every task. This tends to be expensive for the organisation. 2)
Employees with diverse levels of abilities. This is common in industries such
as consulting and healthcare. Matching employees’ skills to the tasks assigned
has been tackled for complex organisations (Cordeau et al, 2010).
Service Time corresponds to the duration of the task and it varies depending on
the employee who performs it and the type of task. Most models in the liter-
ature assume a fixed duration. If service times are long enough so that they
restrict each worker to perform only one job, then the problem reduces to task
allocation since every route would consider only one job per employee.
Connected Activities refer to dependencies among two or more activities. Sequen-
tial dependency occurs when one activity must be performed before or after
another. Temporal dependencies are as defined by Rasmussen et al (2012).
Synchronisation is when two or more activities need to start at the same time.
Overlap occurs when at any point in time, activities happen simultaneously.
In minimum difference dependency, the second activity starts after some given
time has passed since the end of the first activity. A maximum difference de-
pendency establishes a limit for the start on the second activity from the end
of the first activity. A min+max difference dependency is a combination of the
previous two by creating an additional time window for the start of the second
activity based on the end of the first activity.
Teaming is necessary sometimes due to the nature of the work to be carried out (Li
et al, 2005). If team members remain unchanged then the team can be treated
as a single entity and we can assume that all start and end the joint activity
at the same time. Nevertheless, if teams change according to the task, then
synchronising the arrival of employees to the location of the activity is required.
Within teaming, synchronisation refers to employees and not to activities like
Connected Activities. Also, when teams change frequently then skill matching
must be ensured every time teams change to perform a job requiring multiple
skills not present in a single employee (Cordeau et al, 2010).
Clusterisation may be necessary for several reasons. One is that employees may
prefer not to travel more than a number of miles. Another reason is when
companies assign employees to perform work only in certain geographical areas.
Clusters may also be created just to reduce the size of the problem by solving
a number of clustered sub-problems.
3 Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows
The routing part in many of the problems considered here as examples of WSRP
is based on the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). In this
problem the main objective is to minimise the total distance travelled by a set of
vehicles serving customers spread across different locations. Every customer must
be visited once by one vehicle. Each customer specifies a time window when the
visit should take place. The delivery vehicle must arrive at the location within
that specified time window. If the vehicle arrives before the time window, it must
wait until the time window opens to perform the delivery (Desrochers et al, 1992;
Kallehauge et al, 2005). Extensions of the VRPTW include other features such as
multiple trips, multiple depots and synchronisation of vehicles.

Workforce Scheduling and Routing (WSRP)
In the VRPTW extension that covers multiple depots, the fleet of vehicles is
distributed across multiple depots allowing vehicles to return to the closest depot
once all the deliveries by that vehicle have been completed. This VRPTW variant
(Desaulniers et al, 1998) is relevant to our study because its formulation is appli-
cable to workforce scheduling and routing. Many papers in the literature dealing
with WSRP scenarios use this VRPTW variant and associate every employee’s
starting and ending point to a depot. It is also possible for every employee to start
at the same location (depot) but to end their working day at a different location
(home).
Another extension of the VRPTW allows multiple trips (Brand˜ao and Mercer,
1998). This applies to the case when employees could perform more than one trip
on a day to visit the same location. A trip in this context involves a series of tasks
before going back to the depot. In WSRP scenarios, an employee is assumed to
have a means of transportation. Sometimes the employee might need to go back
to the main office (depot) to replenish resources. The type of vehicles that can be
used to access a particular customer’s location might also be restricted as pointed
out by Brand˜ao and Mercer (1997). Vehicles have different capacities which can
be associated to model an heterogeneous workforce. Vehicles can also be hired for
some time which is associated to hiring casual staff.
Finally, another extention of VRPTW which is important to WSRP is the
synchronisation of vehicles. Two or more workers executing a task can be modelled
in the same way as when two or more vehicles need to arrive simultaneously at the
same customer location (Bredstr¨om and onnqvist, 2007). Precedence constraints
in WSRP are also related to synchronisation of vehicles (Bredstr¨om and onnqvist,
2008). Assuming a client should be visited more than once per day, the order of
visits might matter. For example, before technicians install a satellite TV, the
antenna might need calibration and then a demodulator is set. These activities
could be performed by different people at different times but the order matters
and must be respected.
There are many solution methods proposed to tackle the VRPTW. When us-
ing exact approaches, researchers tend to model the problem as multi-commodity
network flow problems (Desaulniers et al, 1998; Salani and Vaca, 2011) or fol-
lowing a set partitioning/covering formulation (Bredstr¨om and onnqvist, 2007).
Such models have been tackled using constraint programming, branch and bound,
and branch and price (column generation) (Barnhart et al, 1998; Desrosiers and
L¨ubbecke, 2005). Other researchers use hybrid methods that employ heuristics
for the generation of columns within a column generation setting (Bredstr¨om and
onnqvist, 2008) or use heuristics to improve an initial solution found with math-
ematical programming (Fischetti et al, 2004). Alternative approaches include di-
viding the problem (clustering) into smaller sub-problems and then obtaining a
global solution. This approach does not guarantee finding the overall global opti-
mal solution but it is sufficient if the objective is to quickly find feasible solutions
(Landa-Silva et al, 2011).
There are a few benchmark data sets for the VRPTW, here we refer to the
ones by Solomon (1987) and Castro-Gutierrez et al (2011) which we adapt for our
computational experiments.

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper study the medical team planning and scheduling in home healthcare within a weekly horizon, including the planning of nursing visits and the daily traveling route scheduling, using three heuristic approaches to generate approximate Pareto fronts in a reasonable time.
Abstract: In this paper, we study the medical team planning and scheduling in home healthcare within a weekly horizon, including the planning of nursing visits and the daily traveling route scheduling. Two objectives are considered: the first one is to minimize the total operation cost of the healthcare agency and the second one is to maximize the patient satisfaction. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer program, to seek for a trade-off between two objectives, with the characteristics of the patient requirements including nursing types, nursing frequency and service length considered. Medical team types, available service days and overwork penalty are also respected in the model. Then an $$\epsilon $$ -constraint method is adopted to obtain exact non-dominated solutions. To address large-scale problem instances, three heuristic approaches are developed to generate approximate Pareto fronts in a reasonable time. The set of non-dominated solutions are valuable for decision-making. Computational experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate the efficiency of the approaches.

26 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An improved Artificial Bee Colony algorithm named as discrete ABC with solution acceptance rule and multi-search (SAMSABC) is proposed and the computational results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ABC algorithm and reveal that the SAMSABC can achieve accurate results within short computational times.

25 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
25 Jul 2016
TL;DR: Results show that the proposed GA, which incorporates tailored components, performs very well and is an effective baseline evolutionary algorithm for this difficult problem.
Abstract: The Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problem refers to the assignment of personnel to visits across various geographical locations. Solving this problem demands tackling scheduling and routing constraints while aiming to minimise the total operational cost. This paper presents a Genetic Algorithm (GA) tailored to tackle a set of real-world instances of this problem. The proposed GA uses a customised chromosome representation to maintain the feasibility of solutions. The performance of several genetic operators is investigated in relation to the tailored chromosome representation. This paper also presents a study of parameter settings for the proposed GA in relation to the various problem instances considered. Results show that the proposed GA, which incorporates tailored components, performs very well and is an effective baseline evolutionary algorithm for this difficult problem.

24 citations


Cites methods from "Workforce scheduling and routing pr..."

  • ...[8] applied a mixed integer programming (MIP) solver to tackle WSRP with time-dependent activities constraints....

    [...]

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: This work presents a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic algorithm, incorporating two novel heuristics tailored to the problem-domain, and shows that the use of domain-knowledge in the design of the algorithm can provide substantial improvements in the quality of solutions.
Abstract: The workforce scheduling and routing problem (WSRP) is a combinatorial optimisation problem where a set of workers must perform visits to geographically scattered locations. We present a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) metaheuristic algorithm to tackle this problem, incorporating two novel heuristics tailored to the problem-domain. The first heuristic restricts the search space using a priority list of candidate workers and the second heuristic seeks to reduce the violation of specific soft constraints. We also present two greedy constructive heuristics to give the VNS a good starting point. We show that the use of domain-knowledge in the design of the algorithm can provide substantial improvements in the quality of solutions. The proposed VNS provides the first benchmark results for the set of real-world WSRP scenarios considered.

24 citations


Cites methods from "Workforce scheduling and routing pr..."

  • ...To evaluate the quality of a solution, the tier-based minimisation objective function shown in Equation (1) is utilised, which is employed by our industrial partner and also commonly used in the literature [16, 2]....

    [...]

DOI
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: A conservative method called robust optimization is applied to handle time uncertainty and the proposed method at the maximum uncertainty level has less than 30% variations in results and in comparison with the deterministic model increases the costs only by 1.2%.
Abstract: Compared to center-based hemodialysis (HD), peritoneal dialysis (PD) has many advantages among which cost effectiveness and comfort of patients are the most important ones. On the other hand the number of PD patients is so small and even decreasing worldwide due to difficulties of this mode of dialysis. Therefore to encourage dialysis patients to choose PD, health system must provide a proper set of care services proportional to special needs of these patients.Applying operations research (OR) as an efficient mathematical tool and considering the realistic assumptions such as travel time uncertainty, first a Vehicle Routing Problem model is presented to serve PD patients at home with special logistic services. Thereafter, based on the criticality of timeliness in providing healthcare service, a conservative method called robust optimization, is applied to handle time uncertainty. The corresponding results show that the proposed method at the maximum uncertainty level has less than 30% variations in results and in comparison with the deterministic model increases the costs only by 1.2%.With small variations in results,this model can handle the travel time uncertainty properly and is highly appropriate and practical to be used in a sensitive application like healthcare where timeliness is crucial.

21 citations

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper considers the design and analysis of algorithms for vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints and finds that several heuristics performed well in different problem environments; in particular an insertion-type heuristic consistently gave very good results.
Abstract: This paper considers the design and analysis of algorithms for vehicle routing and scheduling problems with time window constraints. Given the intrinsic difficulty of this problem class, approximation methods seem to offer the most promise for practical size problems. After describing a variety of heuristics, we conduct an extensive computational study of their performance. The problem set includes routing and scheduling environments that differ in terms of the type of data used to generate the problems, the percentage of customers with time windows, their tightness and positioning, and the scheduling horizon. We found that several heuristics performed well in different problem environments; in particular an insertion-type heuristic consistently gave very good results.

3,211 citations


"Workforce scheduling and routing pr..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...Such instances are the ones by Solomon (1987) and Castro-Gutierrez et al (2011), which represent a total of 183 instances for these initial experiments....

    [...]

  • ...The prefixes used to identify each of the data sets are as follows: Sol refers to the 168 instances from Solomon (1987), Mov refers to the 15 instances from Castro-Gutierrez et al (2011), HHC refers to the 11 instances from Rasmussen et al (2012), Sec refers to the 180 instances from Misir et al…...

    [...]

  • ...There are a few benchmark data sets for the VRPTW, here we refer to the ones by Solomon (1987) and Castro-Gutierrez et al (2011) which we adapt for our computational experiments....

    [...]

  • ...Solomon (1987) VRPTW data set has been used broadly in the literature....

    [...]

  • ...We consider here the following data sets from the literature: (1) VRPTW instances by Solomon (1987), (2) multi-objective VRPTW instances by CastroGutierrez et al (2011), (3) home health care instances by Rasmussen et al (2012), (4) security personnel scheduling instances by Misir et al (2011) and…...

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, column generation methods for integer programs with a huge number of variables are discussed, including implicit pricing of nonbasic variables to generate new columns or to prove LP optimality at a node of the branch-and-bound tree.
Abstract: We discuss formulations of integer programs with a huge number of variables and their solution by column generation methods, i.e., implicit pricing of nonbasic variables to generate new columns or to prove LP optimality at a node of the branch-and-bound tree. We present classes of models for which this approach decomposes the problem, provides tighter LP relaxations, and eliminates symmetry. We then discuss computational issues and implementation of column generation, branch-and-bound algorithms, including special branching rules and efficient ways to solve the LP relaxation. We also discuss the relationship with Lagrangian duality.

2,248 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper presents a heuristic for the pickup and delivery problem based on an extension of the large neighborhood search heuristic previously suggested for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows that is very robust and is able to adapt to various instance characteristics.
Abstract: The pickup and delivery problem with time windows is the problem of serving a number of transportation requests using a limited amount of vehicles. Each request involves moving a number of goods from a pickup location to a delivery location. Our task is to construct routes that visit all locations such that corresponding pickups and deliveries are placed on the same route, and such that a pickup is performed before the corresponding delivery. The routes must also satisfy time window and capacity constraints. This paper presents a heuristic for the problem based on an extension of the large neighborhood search heuristic previously suggested for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The proposed heuristic is composed of a number of competing subheuristics that are used with a frequency corresponding to their historic performance. This general framework is denoted adaptive large neighborhood search. The heuristic is tested on more than 350 benchmark instances with up to 500 requests. It is able to improve the best known solutions from the literature for more than 50% of the problems. The computational experiments indicate that it is advantageous to use several competing subheuristics instead of just one. We believe that the proposed heuristic is very robust and is able to adapt to various instance characteristics.

1,685 citations


"Workforce scheduling and routing pr..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Then, local heuristics based on destroy and repair moves are used to improve the solutions (Ropke and Pisinger, 2006)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A review of staff scheduling and rostering, an area that has become increasingly important as business becomes more service oriented and cost conscious in a global environment, and the models and algorithms that have been reported in the literature for their solution.

1,238 citations


"Workforce scheduling and routing pr..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Many types of personnel scheduling problems have been tackled in the literature (Baker, 1976; Miller, 1976; Golembiewski and Proehl Jr, 1978; Cheang et al, 2003; Ernst et al, 2004; Alfares, 2004)....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper presents a new optimization algorithm capable of optimally solving 100-customer problems of the vehicle routing problem with time windows VRPTW and indicates that this algorithm proved to be successful on a variety of practical sized benchmark VRPTw test problems.
Abstract: The vehicle routing problem with time windows VRPTW is a generalization of the vehicle routing problem where the service of a customer can begin within the time window defined by the earliest and the latest times when the customer will permit the start of service. In this paper, we present the development of a new optimization algorithm for its solution. The LP relaxation of the set partitioning formulation of the VRPTW is solved by column generation. Feasible columns are added as needed by solving a shortest path problem with time windows and capacity constraints using dynamic programming. The LP solution obtained generally provides an excellent lower bound that is used in a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve the integer set partitioning formulation. Our results indicate that this algorithm proved to be successful on a variety of practical sized benchmark VRPTW test problems. The algorithm was capable of optimally solving 100-customer problems. This problem size is six times larger than any reported to date by other published research.

1,085 citations


"Workforce scheduling and routing pr..." refers background in this paper

  • ...If the vehicle arrives before the time window, it must wait until the time window opens to perform the delivery (Desrochers et al, 1992; Kallehauge et al, 2005)....

    [...]

Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Workforce scheduling and routing problems literature survey and computational study" ?

The authors refer to these scenarios as Workforce Scheduling and Routing Problems ( WSRP ) as they usually involve the scheduling of personnel combined with some form of routing in order to ensure that employees arrive on time at the locations where tasks need to be performed. The first part of this paper presents a survey which attempts to identify the common features of WSRP scenarios and the solution methods applied when tackling these problems. The second part of the paper presents a study on the computational difficulty of solving these type of problems. The computational study provides an insight into the structure of the adapted test instances, an insight into the effect that problem features have when solving the instances using mathematical programming, and some benchmark computation times using the Gurobi solver running on a standard personal computer. 

The authors consider some extensions for future work. Secondly, to apply a different MIP model or extend the one by Rasmussen et al ( 2012 ), seeking to include other features such as: employees capacity ( number of hours allowed to work within the time horizon ), employees breaks, and balancing the number of activities in routes. 

Trending Questions (1)
What are the challenges of workforce scheduling?

The paper does not explicitly mention the challenges of workforce scheduling.