Article ID: | iaor20043492 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 128 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 47 |
End Page Number: | 63 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2004 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Thompson Gary M., Goodale John C. |
Keywords: | optimization: simulated annealing |
The labor tour scheduling literature has focused on the development of schedules, and with a few exceptions, employees were assumed to have identical cost and productivity. Even the few exceptions in the literature that solved tour problems considered employees within a work group to have identical cost and productivity. In this paper we evaluated heuristics for assigning individual employees – who differed in cost and productivity – to labor tour schedules. Our results showed that considering productivity levels when assigning individuals to tours increased profitability. We found that a simple managerial heuristic of assigning individuals in descending order of their productivity to cost ratio was both fast and effective over a broad range of service environmental scenarios.