Assigning Team Tasks and Multiple Activities to Fixed Work Shifts

作者：Lequy Quentin^*; Desaulniers Guy; Solomon Marius M

来源：INFOR: Information Systems and Operational Research , 2013, 51(2): 64-75.

DOI：10.3138/infor.51.2.64

• Work shifts
• activity assignment
• team tasks
• precedence relationships
• column generation

In the service industry, the multi-activity and task assignment problem consists of assigning various activities and tasks to given work shifts. An activity has a time-dependent continuous demand (number of employees required to service the customers) and is interruptible, i.e., an employee assigned to it can be relieved at any time. At the opposite, a task has a specific duration, is performed once by a single employee, and is uninterruptible. In this paper, we consider an extension of this problem, called the multi-activity and team task assignment problem where the tasks can be undertaken in different ways by several employees simultaneously. We propose a mixed integer programming formulation and a two-module approach to find solutions to this problem. In the first module, an approximation model for assigning tasks without activities is solved by a mixed integer programming solver. The second module consists of a column generation model for assigning activities by allowing task reassignments during the process. These modules are used within a variable neighborhood descent heuristic. We have performed extensive computational experiments to validate our approach.

• 出版日期2013-5
• 单位东北大学