Efficient greedy algorithms for economic manpower shift planning

• Published in: Engineering optimization Vol. 47; no. 1; pp. 36 - 54
• Main Authors: Nearchou, A.C., Giannikos, I.C., Lagodimos, A.G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Taylor & Francis 02.01.2015; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: assignment; combinatorial; Economics; Experimentation; Greedy algorithms; Heuristic; labour; Maintenance; Manpower; Mathematical problems; Minimum cost; Operations research; Optimization; Optimization algorithms; personnel planning; Production planning; resource allocation; Shift work; Statistical analysis; workforce
• ISSN: 0305-215X; 1029-0273
• DOI: 10.1080/0305215X.2013.868451

Consideration is given to the economic manpower shift planning (EMSP) problem, an NP-hard capacity planning problem appearing in various industrial settings including the packing stage of production in process industries and maintenance operations. EMSP aims to determine the manpower needed in each available workday shift of a given planning horizon so as to complete a set of independent jobs at minimum cost. Three greedy heuristics are presented for the EMSP solution. These practically constitute adaptations of an existing algorithm for a simplified version of EMSP which had shown excellent performance in terms of solution quality and speed. Experimentation shows that the new algorithms perform very well in comparison to the results obtained by both the CPLEX optimizer and an existing metaheuristic. Statistical analysis is deployed to rank the algorithms in terms of their solution quality and to identify the effects that critical planning factors may have on their relative efficiency.