Title: Days-off scheduling for a bus transportation company

Authors: Jari Kyngas, Kimmo Nurmi

Addresses: Satakunta University of Applied Sciences, Tiedepuisto 3, 28600 Pori, Finland. ' Satakunta University of Applied Sciences, Tiedepuisto 3, 28600 Pori, Finland

Abstract: Staff scheduling has become increasingly important for both public sector and private companies. Good rosters have many benefits for an organisation, such as lower costs, more effective utilisation of resources and fairer workloads and shifts. The construction of optimised days-off for the personnel is an important part of the process. This paper presents a successful way to schedule days-off for the staff of a Finnish bus transportation company. The algorithm is a variation of the cooperative local search method. The generated software is currently in use in the company. In the paper, we also present the first collection of artificial test instances for the days-off scheduling.

Keywords: benchmark problems; cooperative local search; days-off scheduling; genetic algorithms; metaheuristics; staff scheduling; real-world scheduling; rostering; test instances; staff rosters; Finland; bus companies; buses.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICA.2011.037950

International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications, 2011 Vol.3 No.1, pp.42 - 49

Received: 22 Jul 2010
Accepted: 26 Jul 2010
Published online: 21 Mar 2015 *

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