Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

2304. Multi-objective optimisation of the Hearing Scheduling Problem in the Court of Law

Invited abstract in session FA-2: Scheduling & Packing, stream Discrete and Combinatorial Optimization.

Friday, 8:45-10:15
Room: H4

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Ieke Schrader
University of Twente
2. Erwin W. Hans
Industrial Engineering & Business Information Systems, University of Twente, fac. Behavioral Management and Social Science
3. Marco Schutten
MB / OMPL, University of Twente

Abstract

The Dutch Judicial system faces efficiency challenges due to limited resources and increasing case disposition times. Tactical allocation of resources (e.g., by solving the Hearing Scheduling Problem (HSP)) reduces the severity of the efficiency problems. The HSP is concerned with scheduling hearing blocks over time and allocating resources (e.g., staff members and courtrooms) to these hearing blocks. A hearing block is a capacity reservation for a specific case type; multiple cases are assigned to one hearing block, which is done at the operational level. Decision-making is under broad limitations, such as staff member capacities, staff member skills and desk activity requirements. In practice, a planner considers the stakeholders' conflicting interests (i.e., justice seekers, system owners and staff members) while constructing a hearing block schedule. Optimising the number of hearing blocks may result in a schedule that performs poorly from a staff member's perspective. Hence, we propose a multi-objective mixed integer linear program that balances the stakeholders' interests by incorporating the workload for staff members, the spread of hearing block types and the total number of hearing blocks into the objective. During the conference, we will present the results of this approach. Our contribution is twofold. First, we formulate two objectives that measure the workload balance for a staff member and spread the hearing block types over the scheduling period in the judicial system. Second, we execute a scenario analysis in which we assess the impact of the importance of the objectives on the generated schedule.

Keywords

Status: accepted


Back to the list of papers