Personnel resources are a variable and dynamic resource that introduce uncertainty in the operational processes. Constructed personnel rosters can be disrupted and render infeasible rosters. Feasibility has to be restored by adapting the original announced nurse rosters. In this paper, we...

In 2007, Brussels Airlines encountered a chronic shortage of pilots leading to a high and unbalanced workload, dissatisfied pilots, and a high turnover rate. The crew rostering process of Brussels Airlines is characterized as a manual preferential fair share process. The successful application...

In this paper we study the characteristics of population based meta-heuristics that distinguish the procedures from a standard meta-heuristic and that positively contribute to the quality of the solutions obtained. More precisely, we investigate and discuss the importance of a wellconsidered...

Custom packs group medical disposable items into a single sterile package that is used for surgical procedures. Although custom packs constitute a well-known concept in the hospital setting, little is known on methodologies to configure them, especially if the number of medical items, procedures...

In this paper, an Artificial Immune System (AIS) algorithm for the resource availability cost problem (RACP) is presented, in which the total cost of the (unlimited) renewable resources required to complete the project by a pre-specified project deadline should be minimized. The AIS algorithm...

In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling a number of jobs on a number of unrelated parallel machines in order to minimize the makespan. We develop two heuristic approaches, i.e. a genetic algorithm and a tabu search algorithm and the hybridization of these heuristics with a truncated...

Personnel costs typically are the second largest costs for airline operations after fuel costs. Since efficient crew employment can drastically reduce operational costs of airline companies, the crew scheduling problem in the airline industry has been extensively investigated in the operations...

In this paper, an overview is presented of the existing metaheuristic solution procedures to solve the multi-mode resource-constrained-project scheduling problem, in which multiple execution modes are available for each of the activities of the project. A fair comparison is made between the...

This paper compares the accuracy of traditional ABC and time-driven ABC in complex and dynamic environments through simulation analysis. First, when unit times in time-driven ABC are known or can be flawlessly estimated, time-driven ABC coincides with the benchmark system and in this case our...

In this paper, an Integer Programming (IP) model is presented to assign MBA and undergraduate students to groups to solve an exam case in an “Operations Research (O.R.)” course. It is assumed that the students have a basic understanding of mathematical programming, and are now ready to build...