A genetic algorithm for the talent scheduling problem

The authors present the talent scheduling problem and provide several hybrid genetic search algorithms for solving this problem. The problem is of scheduling the independent activities of a project (such as a movie) so that the cost of keeping talents (actors) on the project site when not needed is minimized. The problem is an NP-hard problem. The proposed hybrid algorithms use limited pairwise interchange heuristic procedure within the simple genetic algorithm framework. The authors report very impressive results on a set of problems with known optimal solutions.