Constraint Programming Based Column Generation for Employee Timetabling

The Employee Timetabling Problem (ETP) is a general class of problems widely encountered in service organizations (such as call centers for instance). Given a set of activities, a set of demand curves (specifying the demand in terms of employees for each activity for each time period) the problem consists of constructing a set of work shifts such that each activity is at all time covered by a sufficient number of employees. Work shifts can cover many activities and must meet work regulations such as breaks, meals and maximum working time constraints. Furthermore, it is often desired to optimize a global objective function such as minimizing labor costs or maximizing a quality of service measure. This paper presents variants of this problem which are modeled with the Dantzig formulation. This approach consists of first generating all feasible work shifts and then selecting the optimal set. We propose to address the shift generation problem with constraint satisfaction techniques based ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CPAIOR
• Authors: Sophie Demassey, Gilles Pesant, Louis-Martin Rousseau
• Keywords: CPAIOR 2005, Employee Timetabling Problem, Feasible Work Shifts, Work Shifts