| Article ID: | iaor2013771 |
| Volume: | 40 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Start Page Number: | 1023 |
| End Page Number: | 1033 |
| Publication Date: | Apr 2013 |
| Journal: | Computers and Operations Research |
| Authors: | Demeulemeester Erik, Belin Jeroen, De Bruecker Philippe, Van den Bergh Jorne, Cardoen Brecht |
| Keywords: | maintenance, repair & replacement, scheduling, combinatorial optimization, heuristics |
This paper studies the problem of constructing the workforce schedules of an aircraft maintenance company. The problem involves both a staffing and a scheduling decision. We propose an enumerative algorithm with bounding in which each node of the enumeration tree represents a mixed integer linear problem (MILP). We reformulate the MILP such that it becomes tractable for commercial MILP solvers. Extensive computational tests on 40 instances that are derived from a real‐life setting indicate that the algorithm is capable of finding close‐to‐optimal solutions.