"A solution approach to the multi activity combined timetabling and crew scheduling problem considering a heterogeneous workforce with hierarchical skills and stochastic travel times"
Brian Sebastián Álvarez, Diego René Vásquez, David Barrera and Carlos Eduardo Montoya Casas

This paper introduces an extension to the Multi-Activity Combined Timetabling and Crew Scheduling problem which considers heterogeneous personnel with hierarchical skills, multiple work shifts and stochastic travel times. The goal of this problem is to define the number of workers and to stablish a schedule that fulfills customer’s requirements in order to minimize a total cost objective function. As a solution approach, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) was proposed for the deterministic version of the problem. Thereafter, a sim-heuristic was developed for solving the problem with stochastic travel times. The algorithms were tested on randomly generated instances. Obtained results show a good performance of the GA for the deterministic version of the problem. On the other hand, it were validated the benefits in terms of services level of considering an approach that combines simulation and optimization for the solving stochastic version of the problem.