COST-ANALYSIS OF ALTERNATIVE FORMULATIONS FOR PERSONNEL SCHEDULING INCONTINUOUSLY OPERATING ORGANIZATIONS

Personnel-scheduling problems for continuously operating organizations have proven to be difficult to solve optimally. As a consequence, a n umber of alternative approaches have been devised for solving these pr oblems. We provide computational results of a study of the staffing co sts obtained using a prominent alternative formulation approach. The r esults demonstrate that excess staffing costs may result from the use of this approach. We subsequently develop a new local-search heuristic based on the simulated annealing algorithm to generate feasible integ er personnel schedules in continuously operating organizations. The so lution costs and computational effort associated with the new heuristi c are shown to be generally superior to those of branch-and-bound inte ger programming.