Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Technology, Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications, Engineering, Industrial, Operations Research & Management Science, Computer Science, Engineering, Staffing, Scheduling, Aircraft line maintenance, Mixed integer programming, MULTIPROCESSOR TASKS, PROCESSING RATES, PRICE APPROACH, NURSE, MODEL, WORKFORCE, BRANCH, STRATEGIES, SIMULATION, 0102 Applied Mathematics, 0103 Numerical and Computational Mathematics, Operations Research, 3509 Transportation, logistics and supply chains, 4901 Applied mathematics

Abstract:

This paper studies the problem of constructing the workforce schedules of an aircraft maintenance company. The problem involves both a staffing and a scheduling decision. We propose an enumerative algorithm with bounding in which each node of the enumeration tree represents a mixed integer linear problem (MILP). We reformulate the MILP such that it becomes tractable for commercial MILP solvers. Extensive computational tests on 40 instances that are derived from a real-life setting indicate that the algorithm is capable of finding close-to-optimal solutions. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.