Representing employee requirements in labour tour scheduling

This paper uses the methodology of simulation to evaluate six approaches for handling employee requirements in an LP-based labour tour scheduling heuristic. It models employee requirements both as minimum acceptable staffing levels-where understaffing is unacceptable-and as target staffing levels-where both under- and overstaffing are acceptable. For each representation of employee requirements, the paper evaluates forms of the heuristic that use problem-specific and problem-independent information on the costs of employee surpluses and, if appropriate, employee shortages. Over an extensive test data set, the target-staffing approach using problem-specific cost information outperformed all other procedures. Specifically, it generates schedules costing less than 87% of those developed using the approach most commonly found in the literature. Its schedules were also almost 5% cheaper than those of its closest competitor. The paper discusses the managerial and research implications of the findings and provides suggestions for future research.