Article ID: | iaor2009655 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 59 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 34 |
End Page Number: | 43 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2008 |
Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
Authors: | Sherali H.D., Al-Yakoob S.M. |
Keywords: | programming: integer, scheduling |
This paper is concerned with the problem of assigning employees to a number of work centres taking into account employees' expressed preferences for specific shifts, off-days, and work centres. This particular problem is faced by the Kuwait National Petroleum Corporation that hires a firm to prepare schedules for assigning employees to about 86 stations distributed all over Kuwait. The number of variables in a mixed-integer programming model formulated for this problem is overwhelming, and hence, a direct solution to even the continuous relaxation of this model for relatively large-scale instances is inconceivable. However, we demonstrate that a column generation method, which exploits the special structures of the model, can readily solve the continuous relaxation of the model.