The dairy transportation problem (DTP) consists of determining the best routes to be performed for collecting milk from farms and delivering it to processing plants. We study the particular case of the province of Quebec, where the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec is responsible...

Physicians' interests substantially influence intra-organizational dynamics in hospitals, though little is known about the actual content and structure of these interests. The objective of this study was to both identify and build a structured model of physicians' interests. Based on literature...

During the past decade, entrepreneurship in the healthcare sector has become increasingly important. The aging society, the continuous stream of innovative technologies and the growth of chronic illnesses are jeopardizing the sustainability of healthcare systems. In response, many European...

Flexibility in workforce planning is one of the best ways to respond to fluctuations of the demand. This paper proposes a flexible mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to solve a multiple-shift workforce planning problem under annualized working hours. The model takes into account laws...

We consider a master surgery scheduling (MSS) problem in which block operating room (OR) time is assigned to different surgical specialties. While many MSS approaches in the literature consider only the impact of the MSS on operating theater and operating staff, we enlarge the scope to...

In spite of its tremendous economic significance, the problem of sales staff schedule optimization for retail stores has received relatively scant attention. Current approaches typically attempt to minimize payroll costs by closely fitting a staffing curve derived from exogenous sales forecasts,...

This paper studies a districting problem that arises in the context of financial product pricing. The challenge lies in partitioning a set of small geographical regions into a set of larger territories. In each territory, the customers will share a common price. These territories need to be...

This paper presents a constraint programming approach for a batch processing machine on which a finite number of jobs of non-identical sizes must be scheduled. A parallel batch processing machine can process several jobs simultaneously and the objective is to minimize the maximal lateness. The...

This paper presents a new implicit formulation for shift scheduling problems, using context-free grammars to model the rules for the composition of shifts. From the grammar, we generate an integer programming (IP) model having a linear programming relaxation equivalent to that of the classical...

The multi-vehicle covering tour problem (m-CTP) involves finding a minimum-length set of vehicle routes passing through a subset of vertices, subject to constraints on the length of each route and the number of vertices that it contains, such that each vertex not included in any route lies...