Heuristical labour scheduling to optimize airport passenger flows

We describe the development and implementation of a decision support system for the optimization of passenger flow by trading off service quality and labour costs at an airport. The system integrates a simulation module with an optimization module that requires that Dantzig's labour scheduling problem be solved in the order of thousands of times. We developed a customized scatter search to give the system the capability of finding high-quality solutions to the labour scheduling problems in short computational times. Our experiments verify that our scatter search implementation meets the needed requirements.