This year, Optit once again participated as a sponsor at the International Conference on Optimization and Decision Science (ODS) organized by AIRO, the Italian Operations Research Society.
The conference addressed key topics in the fields of operations research, optimization, problem-solving, decision-making processes, and their practical applications. These are themes particularly dear to us, as we tackle them daily in our pursuit of innovative solutions for our clients.
This year’s focus was especially aligned with our history and approach to this discipline. The conference’s title: “Operations Research: closing the gap between research and practice” fully reflects our commitment. Since our founding, we have embraced the challenge of bringing the most advanced mathematical research techniques to address real-world problems faced by companies and organizations. As such, we are excited and eager to engage with the OR community on this topic.
Andrea Bettinelli, Senior Operations Research Specialist at Optit, chaired the session on “Timetabling,” where he also presented the work “A Mixed-integer Linear Program to create the shifts in a supermarket.”
Solutions are usually found by dividing the problem in two steps: first the shifts are created, then the employees are assigned to them by respecting a bunch of constraints.
The assignment of different tasks increases the complexity, since we have to consider the skills of the single employee necessary to perform any activity.
In this paper we present an integer linear programming formulation which models together the shift creation and the construction of rosters for employees, considering the different tasks, with the objective of minimizing the amount of uncovered demand.
Finally we provide the results for three real-world instances, confirming that this approach is promising.
Obviously combining these steps makes the problem even harder, but providing good solutions will help the companies both on the manager and on the employee point of view.
For more details on the conference, visit the ODS official website: https://www.airoconference.it/ods2024
