Grammar-Based Column Generation for Personalized Multi-Activity Shift Scheduling
Marie-Claude Côté, Bernard Gendron, Louis-Martin Rousseau · INFORMS journal on computing · 2012
We present a branch-and-price algorithm to solve personalized multi-activity shift scheduling problems. The subproblems in the column generation method are formulated using grammars and solved with dynamic programming. The expressiveness of context-free grammars is exploited to easily model restrictions over shifts, allowing the branch-and-price algorithm to solve large-scale problem instances. We present computational experiments on two types of multi-activity shift scheduling problems and compare our approach with existing methods in the literature. These experiments show that our approach can efficiently solve large-scale instances and is flexible enough to model different classes of problems.