Title: Optimising coordinated multi-team volunteer scheduling: a combined constraint programming and goal programming approach

Authors: Christopher Garcia; Ghaith Rabadi

Addresses: Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, Old Dominion University, 241 Kaufman Hall, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA ' Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, Old Dominion University, 241 Kaufman Hall, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA

Abstract: Volunteer scheduling is often more difficult than other types of labour scheduling because the non-compulsory nature of such work requires organisations to respect many more preferences and constraints. Furthermore, there is very little existing research in this type of scheduling. In this paper, we describe a software system based on constraint programming (CP) and goal programming (GP) we developed to enable a volunteer-run church to schedule its weekly operations. Multiple volunteer teams operate each week within this organisation, and each team has a required number of weekly volunteers. Each team has its own scheduling objective: either to maximise the amount of time each worker has off or to maximise worker participation. Conflicts between jobs and workers must also be prevented in addition to respecting several types of worker preferences. We develop a CP–GP approach for solving this problem and discuss the computational results obtained.

Keywords: volunteer scheduling; constraint programming; goal programming; multi-objective optimisation; volunteer teams; volunteers; volunteering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2011.042834

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2011 Vol.9 No.2, pp.183 - 194

Published online: 07 Feb 2015 *

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