Combining metaheuristic algorithms to solve a scheduling problem

Abstract

The Labour Scheduling problem in the context of any transport company is a complex optimization problem of that belongs to the class of NP-Hard problems. In these cases, it is not viable to try to find an exact solution and therefore, they require methods that assure the optimal management of the available resources in the tracing of the work calendars under the most suitable criteria of economy of times and costs. The main purpose of this research is to propose an efficient method to determine optimal shifts in a generic transport company, using bio-inspired methods. This method employs a two-step approach to obtain a solution. In a first stage, a Grasp algorithm is used to generate a viable solution. Then in a second stage, this preliminary solution is tuned, in order to obtain an optimal one, by using a Scatter Search algorithm. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.