Optimization and heuristic models to integrate project task and manpower scheduling

The objective of project scheduling is to determine start dates and the labor resources assigned to each activity in order to complete a project on time. By moving start dates within available slack times and altering labor levels, the daily labor-demand profile can be changed. The objective of personnel scheduling is to determine how many of each feasible workday tour are required to satisfy a given labor-demand profile while minimizing the cost of labor plus overhead. Integrating these two problems permits the simultaneous determination of start dates, labor levels and tours for a minimum-cost and on-time schedule. In this paper, single and multiple resource optimization models and heuristic solution procedures to solve the integrated problem are presented. The heuristic procedure outperformed the non-integrated two-step scheduling procedure by reducing the cost of labor and overhead and performed nearly as well as the optimization procedure.