Integer programming to schedule a hierarchical workforce with variable demands

✍ Scribed by Alain Billionnet

• Book ID: 104339824
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 109 KB
• Volume: 114
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0377-2217
• DOI: 10.1016/s0377-2217(98)00182-9

✦ Synopsis

We consider a hierarchical workforce in which a higher quali®ed worker can substitute for a lower quali®ed one, but not vice versa. Daily labor requirements within a week may vary, but each worker must receive n o-days in the week. This problem has been considered by Hung (R. Hung, Eur. J. Oper. Res. 78(1) (1994) 49±57), who discusses a necessary and sucient condition for a labor mix to be feasible and presents a simple one-pass method that frequently gives the least cost labor mix. We show in this paper that the integer programming approach is well suited for solving this problem: the de®nition of the integer programming model is simple, its implementation is immediate by using, for example, the Mathematical programming language (MPL) and the integer programming solver XA, the computation times are low (generally a few seconds on a small microcomputer) and ®nally the powerful of the integer programming approach allows us to extend the model in two interesting directions.