A decomposition heuristic for short-term planning of assessment centres Online publication date: Fri, 05-Jan-2018
by Tom Rihm; Norbert Trautmann
European J. of Industrial Engineering (EJIE), Vol. 11, No. 6, 2017
Abstract: In an assessment centre, several candidates for a job vacancy perform a set of predefined tasks while being observed and evaluated by so-called assessors. For the organisers of such assessment centres, a challenging job is to schedule the tasks and assign the prescribed number of assessors to the tasks such that the total waiting time for the assessors is minimised. This planning situation has been reported to us by a human resource management service provider. Application-specific restrictions distinguish this problem from related scheduling problems discussed in the literature, e.g., the resource-constrained project scheduling problem. We present a mixed-integer programming-based decomposition heuristic, which iterates between pre-scheduling, assignment, and re-scheduling subproblems. Our computational results demonstrate that this novel heuristic outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on a set of 240 benchmark instances. Furthermore, this heuristic provides optimal solutions to a set of four real-life instances. [Received 30 September 2016; Revised 26 January 2017; Accepted 27 April 2017]
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the European J. of Industrial Engineering (EJIE):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook