Flexible weekly tour scheduling for postal service workers using a branch and price

Authors:
Jens O. Brunner;Jonathan F. Bard
Affiliations:
TUM School of Management, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany 80333;Graduate Program in Operations Research & Industrial Engineering, The University of Texas, Austin, USA 78712-0292
Venue:
Journal of Scheduling
Year:
2013

Citing 9
Cited 1

Implicit modeling of flexible break assignments in optimal shift scheduling

Management Science
Improved implicit optimal modeling of the labor shift scheduling problem

Management Science
Scheduling workforce and workflow in a high volume factory

Management Science
An efficient two-phase algorithm for cyclic days-off scheduling

Computers and Operations Research
Staff scheduling at the United States postal service

Computers and Operations Research
Branch-And-Price: Column Generation for Solving Huge Integer Programs

Operations Research
On Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition in Integer Programming and ways to Perform Branching in a Branch-and-Price Algorithm

Operations Research
The State of the Art of Nurse Rostering

Journal of Scheduling
An exact algorithm for IP column generation

Operations Research Letters

Stabilized branch and price with dynamic parameter updating for discontinuous tour scheduling

Computers and Operations Research

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of flexible shift scheduling of service employees at mail processing and distribution centers. Our main objective is to determine staffing levels for different worker categories subject to a host of union restrictions and general labor regulations. The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer linear program and solved with branch and price algorithm. Using real data provided by a US Postal Service a variety of computational experiments are performed to quantify the benefits of scheduling flexibility. These include different shift starting times, different shift lengths, a lunch break allowance, and different days-off assignments. In addition, the ratio between regular and flexible workers is varied to investigate its effect on costs. The results show the efficiency of the proposed procedure. Finally, we offer some managerial insights gained from the analysis.