Integrated project operations and personnel scheduling with multiple labour classes

The main theme of this paper is improving project schedules by integrating the scheduling of project jobs and labour resources. An ILP model is presented of the integrated project operations and personnel scheduling problem with multiple labour categories. Traditionally, this problem is solved in two steps: first, operations are scheduled by solving the resource-constrained project scheduling problem; then, labour categories are scheduled by solving the personnel days-off scheduling problem. The proposed model combines the two stages into an integrated problem, which is solved in one step. Using 48 test problems, the two methods were compared in terms of total cost, labour cost and scheduling efficiency. The results clearly indicate that the integrated model outperforms the traditional two-step method.