IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/annopr/v239y2016i1d10.1007_s10479-014-1597-3.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Near-optimal MIP solutions for preference based self-scheduling

Author

Listed:
  • Eyjólfur Ingi Ásgeirsson

    (Reykjavík University & ICE-TCS)

  • Guðríður Lilla Sigurðardóttir

    (Reykjavík University)

Abstract

Making a high quality staff schedule is both difficult and time consuming for any company that has employees working on irregular schedules. We formulate a mixed integer program (MIP) to find a feasible schedule that satisfies all hard constraints while minimizing the soft constraint violations as well as satisfying as many of the employees’ requests as possible. We present the MIP model and show the result from four real world companies and institutions. We also compare the results with those of a local search based algorithm that is designed to emulate the solution strategies when the schedules are created manually. The results show that using near-optimal solutions from the MIP model, with a relative MIP gap of around 0.01–0.1, instead of finding the optimal solution, allows us to find very good solutions in a reasonable amount of time that compare favorably with both the manual solutions and the solutions found by the local search based algorithm.

Suggested Citation

  • Eyjólfur Ingi Ásgeirsson & Guðríður Lilla Sigurðardóttir, 2016. "Near-optimal MIP solutions for preference based self-scheduling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 239(1), pages 273-293, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:239:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1007_s10479-014-1597-3
    DOI: 10.1007/s10479-014-1597-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-014-1597-3
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10479-014-1597-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hesham Alfares, 2004. "Survey, Categorization, and Comparison of Recent Tour Scheduling Literature," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 127(1), pages 145-175, March.
    2. Dowsland, Kathryn A., 1998. "Nurse scheduling with tabu search and strategic oscillation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 106(2-3), pages 393-407, April.
    3. A.T. Ernst & H. Jiang & M. Krishnamoorthy & B. Owens & D. Sier, 2004. "An Annotated Bibliography of Personnel Scheduling and Rostering," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 127(1), pages 21-144, March.
    4. Jeroen Beliën & Erik Demeulemeester, 2007. "On the trade-off between staff-decomposed and activity-decomposed column generation for a staff scheduling problem," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 155(1), pages 143-166, November.
    5. John J. Bartholdi, 1981. "A Guaranteed-Accuracy Round-off Algorithm for Cyclic Scheduling and Set Covering," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 29(3), pages 501-510, June.
    6. Deborah L. Kellogg & Steven Walczak, 2007. "Nurse Scheduling: From Academia to Implementation or Not?," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 37(4), pages 355-369, August.
    7. Brusco, Michael J. & Jacobs, Larry W., 1995. "Cost analysis of alternative formulations for personnel scheduling in continuously operating organizations," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 86(2), pages 249-261, October.
    8. S M Al-Yakoob & H D Sherali, 2008. "A column generation approach for an employee scheduling problem with multiple shifts and work locations," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 59(1), pages 34-43, January.
    9. Bard, Jonathan F. & Purnomo, Hadi W., 2005. "Preference scheduling for nurses using column generation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 164(2), pages 510-534, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Leung, Polly P.L. & Wu, C.H. & Kwong, C.K. & Ip, W.H. & Ching, W.K., 2021. "Digitalisation for optimising nursing staff demand modelling and scheduling in nursing homes," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eyjólfur Ásgeirsson, 2014. "Bridging the gap between self schedules and feasible schedules in staff scheduling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 218(1), pages 51-69, July.
    2. Van den Bergh, Jorne & Beliën, Jeroen & De Bruecker, Philippe & Demeulemeester, Erik & De Boeck, Liesje, 2013. "Personnel scheduling: A literature review," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 226(3), pages 367-385.
    3. Dohn, Anders & Mason, Andrew, 2013. "Branch-and-price for staff rostering: An efficient implementation using generic programming and nested column generation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 230(1), pages 157-169.
    4. Lin, Shih-Wei & Ying, Kuo-Ching, 2014. "Minimizing shifts for personnel task scheduling problems: A three-phase algorithm," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 237(1), pages 323-334.
    5. Maenhout, Broos & Vanhoucke, Mario, 2013. "An integrated nurse staffing and scheduling analysis for longer-term nursing staff allocation problems," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 485-499.
    6. De Bruecker, Philippe & Van den Bergh, Jorne & Beliën, Jeroen & Demeulemeester, Erik, 2015. "Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 243(1), pages 1-16.
    7. E. Veen & J. L. Hurink & J. M. J. Schutten & S. T. Uijland, 2016. "A flexible iterative improvement heuristic to support creation of feasible shift rosters in self-rostering," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 239(1), pages 189-206, April.
    8. Jens Brunner & Günther Edenharter, 2011. "Long term staff scheduling of physicians with different experience levels in hospitals using column generation," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 14(2), pages 189-202, June.
    9. Burke, Edmund K. & Curtois, Timothy & Post, Gerhard & Qu, Rong & Veltman, Bart, 2008. "A hybrid heuristic ordering and variable neighbourhood search for the nurse rostering problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 188(2), pages 330-341, July.
    10. Mathirajan, M. & Ramanathan, R., 2007. "A (0-1) goal programming model for scheduling the tour of a marketing executive," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 179(2), pages 554-566, June.
    11. Vanhoucke, Mario & Maenhout, Broos, 2009. "On the characterization and generation of nurse scheduling problem instances," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 196(2), pages 457-467, July.
    12. Elina Rönnberg & Torbjörn Larsson, 2010. "Automating the self-scheduling process of nurses in Swedish healthcare: a pilot study," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 35-53, March.
    13. Yongjian Li & Jian Chen & Xiaoqiang Cai, 2007. "An integrated staff-sizing approach considering feasibility of scheduling decision," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 155(1), pages 361-390, November.
    14. Banu Sungur & Cemal Özgüven & Yasemin Kariper, 2017. "Shift scheduling with break windows, ideal break periods, and ideal waiting times," Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, Springer, vol. 29(2), pages 203-222, June.
    15. Tristan Becker & Pia Mareike Steenweg & Brigitte Werners, 2019. "Cyclic shift scheduling with on-call duties for emergency medical services," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 22(4), pages 676-690, December.
    16. Edmund Burke & Jingpeng Li & Rong Qu, 2012. "A Pareto-based search methodology for multi-objective nurse scheduling," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 196(1), pages 91-109, July.
    17. Paola Cappanera & Filippo Visintin & Roberta Rossi, 2022. "The emergency department physician rostering problem: obtaining equitable solutions via network optimization," Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, Springer, vol. 34(4), pages 916-959, December.
    18. Broos Maenhout & Mario Vanhoucke, 2013. "Analyzing the nursing organizational structure and process from a scheduling perspective," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 16(3), pages 177-196, September.
    19. Topaloglu, Seyda, 2009. "A shift scheduling model for employees with different seniority levels and an application in healthcare," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 198(3), pages 943-957, November.
    20. Michael J. Brusco & Larry W. Jacobs, 1998. "Personnel Tour Scheduling When Starting-Time Restrictions Are Present," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 44(4), pages 534-547, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:annopr:v:239:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1007_s10479-014-1597-3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.