Integrating Machine Scheduling and Personnel Allocation in a Large-Scale Analytical Services Facility via Column Generation

Abstract: This work investigates the integration of machine scheduling and personnel allocation problems. In machine scheduling, the goal is to find the optimal assignment of jobs to machines within a given time horizon, considering processing times and machine capacities in a time-discretized model. Personnel allocation problems aim to determine the best employee distribution while respecting business, regulatory, or satisfaction constraints (for example, maximum work hours for an employee in a specific activity, the duration an employee can remain in one activity without rest, or preferred workdays). These two problems are inherently connected and should ideally be addressed together in a unified formulation, though this is computationally demanding. This work introduces a column generation-based algorithm designed to find good quality solutions for an industrial-scale analytical services facility where integrated machine scheduling and personnel allocation decisions are made daily. Our computational results indicate that the proposed approach consistently produces high-quality solutions even as the problem size increases, outperforming other existing methods.

Mathematics

Audience: researchers in the topic

PIMS-CORDS SFU Operations Research Seminar