EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2722. Logic-Based Benders Decomposition for a labour constrained production scheduling problem

Invited abstract in session WB-12: Workforce scheduling, stream Scheduling and Project Management.

Wednesday, 10:30-12:00
Room: Clarendon SR 1.02

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Johanna Mlekusch
Department of Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna
2. Carla Juvin
Université Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier, LAAS, Toulouse, France
3. Christian Artigues
LAAS, CNRS
4. Richard Hartl
Business Decisions & Analytics, University of Vienna

Abstract

In modern project and production management, efficiently allocating limited resources to tasks is a critical challenge. This research is motivated by a production problem in the screen-printing industry, modelled as the Dual-Resource-Constrained Re-entrant Flexible Flow Shop, an extension of the Re-entrant Flow Shop Problem. In addition, the problem involves a heterogeneous, multi-skilled workforce, and machines require skilled workers to operate throughout the processing time. As a result, the schedule must not only adhere to precedence constraints but also account for resource limitations while ensuring that tasks are assigned to workers with the necessary skills.
Previous research has proposed a constraint programming model and a hybrid genetic algorithm to tackle large problem instances, yielding feasible solutions within a short time frame. This study introduces a novel exact solution method based on Logic-Based-Benders decomposition. The proposed decomposition method is evaluated against the constraint programming model for the integrated problem on a set of small instances. Preliminary results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the constraint programming approach by proving optimality in more cases and within a shorter time frame while also providing tighter bounds for instances that could not be solved to proven optimality.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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