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A constructive heuristic for staff scheduling in the glass industry

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Abstract

In this paper a constructive heuristic for solving the staff scheduling problem of a glass manufacture unit is proposed. Based on simple calculations and algorithms, the developed procedure assigns working shifts and days-off to teams of employees, ensuring the satisfaction of a mandatory sequence of working shifts and the balance of the workload between employees. The computational times for the experiments with the case study company, with three eight-hour working shifts and five teams of employees, fell consistently below 5 seconds for a set of different planning periods. Results are compared with the ones achieved with an optimization model (MIP), demonstrating the good performance of the heuristic, also in terms of the quality of the achieved solutions. The heuristic rarely fails to produce a feasible solution and whenever the solution is feasible then it is also optimal. When tackling problems with a large number of teams, the heuristic maintains the good performance while the MIP model is not able to find any solution within 16 hours of running time. Although it was designed for a particular problem of the glass industry, tests show that the heuristic is flexible enough to be applied to problems with different features, from other activity sectors, encouraging further extensions of this work.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially funded by the ERDF—European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project FCOMP—01-0124-FEDER-037281.

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  1. INESC TEC, Faculdade de Engenharia, Universidade do Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n, 4200-465, Porto, Portugal

    Marta Rocha, José Fernando Oliveira & Maria Antónia Carravilla

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  1. Marta Rocha
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  2. José Fernando Oliveira
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  3. Maria Antónia Carravilla
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Correspondence to Marta Rocha.

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Rocha, M., Oliveira, J.F. & Carravilla, M.A. A constructive heuristic for staff scheduling in the glass industry. Ann Oper Res 217, 463–478 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-013-1525-y

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