Fast local search and guided local search and their application to British Telecom's workforce scheduling problem

Authors:
Edward Tsang;Chris Voudouris
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK;Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK
Venue:
Operations Research Letters
Year:
1997

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Abstract

This paper reports a fast local search (FLS) algorithm which helps to improve the efficiency of hill climbing and a guided local search (GLS) algorithm which was developed to help local search to escape local optima and distribute search effort. To illustrate how these algorithms work, this paper describes their application to British Telecom's workforce scheduling problem, which is a hard real life problem. The effectiveness of FLS and GLS are demonstrated by the fact that they both outperform all the methods applied to this problem so far, which include simulated annealing, genetic algorithms and constraint logic programming.