A perturbation matheuristic for the integrated personnel shift and task re-scheduling problem

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a heuristic optimisation procedure for the integrated personnel shift and task re-scheduling problem. We assume that schedule disruptions arise as the baseline personnel roster is subject to three sources of operational variability, i.e. uncertainty of capacity, uncertainty of demand and uncertainty of arrival. In order to restore the feasibility of the personnel roster and to minimise the number of deviations compared to the original roster, we propose a heuristic re-scheduling procedure that thrives on a perturbation mechanism to diversify the search and a variable neighbourhood search to intensify the search in the region of a solution point. In the computational experiments, we assess the contribution of the different algorithmic building blocks and benchmark our algorithm with other optimisation procedures.