A branch-and-price approach for large-scale employee tour scheduling problems

We present a new methodology for solving large-scale employee tour scheduling problems. An integer programming model is proposed where tours are decomposed into shifts and start times. This formulation can model complex shift and start time rules for both continuous and discontinuous scheduling problems. A branch-and-price approach is devised to solve this model efficiently. The methodology was tested on the largest tour scheduling problems found in the open literature. In comparison with an alternative implicit model, our approach showed superior computational performance.