An Integrated Flexible Job Shop and Personnel Problem

This study investigates the integration of production and personnel scheduling problems. Production scheduling considers the flexible job shop problem, while personnel scheduling reflects the labor regulations commonly adopted in the relevant studies. A mathematical formulation is proposed to characterize the features of the integration. To solve the integrated formulation, we propose a solution strategy that generates multiple effective cuts simultaneously from the personnel scheduling problem with the production scheduling results from a genetic algorithm (GA). The cuts are added back to the integrated formulation to reduce the solution space. The proposed solution strategy takes advantage of the search abilities of the GA while ensuring the optimality of the solution identified. Numerical experiments show that the proposed solution strategy can solve the integrated problem efficiently and that problem instances of a realistic size can be solved within reasonable computational times