A Greedy Heuristic for Workforce Scheduling and Routing With Time-dependent Activities Constraints

We present a greedy heuristic (GHI) designed to tackle five time-dependent activities constraints (synchronisation, overlap, minimum difference, maximum difference and minimum-maximum difference) on workforce scheduling and routing problems. These types of constraints are important because they allow the modelling of situations in which activities relate to each other time-wise, e.g. synchronising two technicians to complete a job. These constraints often make the scheduling and routing of employees more difficult. GHI is tested on set of benchmark instances from different workforce scheduling and routing problems (WSRPs). We compare the results obtained by GHI against the results from a mathematical programming solver. The comparison seeks to determine which solution method achieves more best solutions across all instances. Two parameters of GHI are discussed, the sorting of employees and the sorting of visits. We conclude that using the solver is adequate for instances with less than 100 visits but for larger instances GHI obtains better results in less time.