Labour scheduling at an airport refuelling installation

We have developed an automatic assignment procedure for labour scheduling at a continuously operating airport refuelling installation. Different types of workers are subject to different conditions on the shifts they can do (morning, evening or night), shift lengths, days-off, holidays, terms of contract and working hours. The scheduling process is carried out on a weekly basis, but there are mid-term and long-term conditions and objectives which link each week with the preceding and following weeks. Our package uses firstly a tabu search algorithm to find the best schemes of shifts/days-off to be used to cover the requirements. Secondly, an assignment problem is solved to match the schemes with available workers. Finally, the starting and finishing times for each working day are determined for each worker. The system has been designed to run on a personal computer and gives good quality solutions in very short computing times.