High-Performance Local Search for Task Scheduling with Human Resource Allocation

In this paper, a real-life problem of task scheduling with human resource allocation is addressed. This problem was approached by the authors in the context of the ROADEF 2007 Challenge, which is an international competition organized by the French Operations Research Society. The subject of the contest, proposed by the telecommunications company France Tele com , consists in planning maintenance interventions and teams of technicians needed for their achievements. The addressed combinatorial optimization problem is very hard: it contains several NP-hard subproblems and its scale (hundreds of interventions and technicians) induces a huge combinatorics. An effective and efficient local-search heuristic is described to solve this problem. This algorithm was ranked 2nd of the competition (over the 35 teams who have submitted a solution). Moreover, a methodology is revealed to design and engineer high-performance local-search heuristics for solving practically discrete optimization problems.

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