Personnel-Equipment Assignment to Operations with Flexible Start and End Time

Hui Chen Fei

Abstract

This thesis addresses the problem of assigning personnel and equipment to operations with flexible start and end time. Unlike most other literature, this is a three dimensional problem (operations, personnel and equipments), and it also has a time-window for operations to begin. Due to the complexity of the problem, computation was only feasible on relatively smaller datasets.

The problem was first modeled with exact integer programming formulation. Following which, a post-processing procedure was introduced to reduce the size of the model. Besides solving this time-window model, two different variations were introduced to solve a predefined start-time problem (fixed start-time model) and unrestricted start-time problem (unrestricted model) respectively. The experimental results on data sets of different sizes showed that the unrestricted model exhibits significantly longer computational time over the other two models, with the fixed start-time model using the least computational time. Also, it showed that optimal solution improves as the time-window lengthens.

This thesis concludes that introduction of time-window to operations did improve the optimal solution; however, it is most worthwhile to introduce smaller time-window because the improvement in optimal solution would be weighed down by the increase in computational time for larger time-window.