Computers & Industrial Engineering

abstract This work proposes a scheduling problem for the workforce management in a chain of supermarketsoperating in Italy. We focus on determining the ideal mix of full-time and part-time workers whichare needed every week to guarantee a satisfactory service level during the check-out operations. The gen-eration of working shifts, to be assigned to retail workers, is subject to several constraints imposed byboth labour laws and enterprise bargaining agreements.We present a mathematical formulation of the problem followed by an exact solution approach whichrelies on the definition of feasible daily working shifts. The number of feasible daily shifts, that arecombined to determine feasible weekly shifts, could drastically increase, depending on the selectedplanning interval. In addition, there may exist additional constraints, that are difficult to incorporate intothe mathematical model. For these reasons, a hybrid heuristic, which does not require the generation ofall feasible weekly shifts, is proposed in this paper.Using appropriate statistical techniques, a sensitivity analysis is performed to test the design of thehybrid heuristic. Computational tests are carried out by solving several real instances provided by theretail firm. The results obtained by the heuristic are compared both with an exact approach and withthe solutions adopted by the retail company, which have been determined by using a naif approach.Our hybrid heuristic exhibits excellent performance finding optimal or near optimal solutions in a verylimited CPU time. 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.