An integrated personnel allocation and machine scheduling problem for industrial size multipurpose plants

Abstract

This paper describes the development and implementation of an optimization model to solve the integrated problem of personnel allocation and machine scheduling for industrial size multipurpose plants. Although each of these problems has been extensively studied separately, works that study an integrated approach are very limited, particularly for large-scale industrial applications. We present a mathematical formulation for the integrated problem and show the results obtained from solving large size instances from an analytical services facility. The integrated formulation can improve the results up to 22.1% compared to the case where the personnel allocation and the machine scheduling problems are solved sequentially.