EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2726. Distributed Workforce and Machine Rostering: A Multi-Criteria Approach

Invited abstract in session TB-59: Transportation applications, stream Transportation.

Tuesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Liberty 1.14

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Daniel Miodowski
Chair of Business Administration, esp. Industrial Management, Dresden University of Technology
2. Martin Scheffler
Chair of Business Management, especially Industrial Management, TU Dresden
3. Aron Lange
Technical University Dresden

Abstract

Companies in the German railway construction industry face the challenge of coordinating machines and workers across different construction sites. Motivated by operational practice, we present two mathematical formulations to address an integrated machine routing and worker rostering problem. Given a set of construction orders distributed across multiple locations, our primary objective is to maximize the number of completed orders within a fixed planning horizon. Each order consists of multiple shifts, requiring the assignment of a worker and machines. All shifts within an order must be covered with the required resources to be considered complete. Beyond the primary objective, we account for secondary goals, such as minimizing transport distances, reducing worker travel times, and assigning workers to shifts with their preferred machines. To tackle this problem, we introduce a network flow model based on traditional routing and flow formulations and an assignment-based model commonly used in rostering problems. Both serve as the foundation for constraint programming approaches. Our comparative analysis demonstrates that the assignment-based formulation outperforms the network flow formulation in maximizing the number of completed orders. When incorporating secondary objectives in a two-step multi-objective approach, constraint programming for the assignment model yields higher-quality solutions, whereas the mixed-integer programming model provides tighter bounds.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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