A Heuristic Scheduling Algorithm

Abstract

This paper describes a heuristic algorithm developed to schedule a group of individuals such that every person performs each of the different activities they desire at some point during the time-frame of the schedule and the difference between the exogenously given number of people desired at each available location-activity-period position and those allocated to these positions is minimized. The contribution of the present work is in the formulation of the problem, and the resulting ease with which good solutions to large-scale problems can be generated, rather than in the mechanics of the algorithm itself. The mathematic formulation of the scheduling problem is presented first, and subsequently, the solution strategy is elaborated. Experimental results on some reasonably large problems are also presented.