Workforce scheduling with synchronization constraints and ergonomic aspects at cross dock platforms

Abstract

This research studied a practical scheduling problem arising in the repackaging phase of cross-dock platforms. Packaging/repackaging is one of the significant concerns in cross-dock internal operations, where most of the tasks have been done by a number limited of teams. The problem also contains many practical constraints such as synchronization between teams and ergonomic aspects,as well as several managerial constraints. These conditions make internal workforce scheduling a complex and important issue for cross-docks. Implementation of the decision support system for planning and manpower scheduling in the repackaging phase of a cross-dock is encouraged us for this research. We try to model a real-world problem from automotive industry. Due to the non-deterministic polynomial time hardness (NP-hard) of the problem, finding a good solution is difficult.Therefore a novel greedy construction heuristic algorithm is proposed. We apply this heuristic method for real problem instances. Although the current process of planning and scheduling is manually and time consuming, our proposed algorithm generates good results for real problem instances in reasonable times.

Keywords

• staff scheduling
• ergonomics
• Synchronization constraints
• Greedy construction heuristic
• Cross-dock

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