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France Telecom workforce scheduling problem: a challenge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2009

Sebastian Pokutta  and
Gautier Stauffer
Sebastian Pokutta
Affiliation:
Operations Research Center, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; pokutta@mit.edu
Gautier Stauffer
Affiliation:
IBM Zurich Research Lab, Säumerstrasse 4, 8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland; gst@zurich.ibm.com
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Abstract

In this paper, we describe the methodology used to tackle France Telecom workforce scheduling problem (the subject of the Roadef Challenge 2007) and we report the results obtained on the different data sets provided for the competition. Since the problem at hand appears to be NP-hard and due to the high dimensions of the instance sets, we use a two-step heuristical approach. We first devise a problem-tailored heuristic that provides good feasible solutions and then we use a meta-heuristic scheme to improve the current results. The tailored heuristic makes use of sophisticated integer programming models and the corresponding sub-problems are solved using CPLEX while the meta-heuristic framework is a randomized local search algorithm. The approach herein described allowed us to rank 5th in this challenge.

Keywords

Workforce schedulingschedule generation schemeroadef challenge.
Type
Research Article
Information
RAIRO - Operations Research , Volume 43 , Issue 4: ROADEF 07 , October 2009 , pp. 375 - 386
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, ROADEF, SMAI, 2009

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