Heterogeneous labor scheduling with elastic tasks

In the area of service, the heterogeneous labor is widely used, and it's a really important and challenging problem faced by company to schedule the labor reasonably and effectively. In this kind of problem, labor can be part-time available and tasks could be executed in one of some possible moments, but they should be accomplished as soon as possible. An integer programming model for heterogeneous labor scheduling with elastic tasks is developed in this paper. And a heuristic algorithm is proposed, which decomposes the whole scheduling problem into a series of sub-problem in which assignment will be taken place in every time window. The comparative computational experiment indicates that the proposed heuristic algorithm has high effectiveness and efficiency. It can achieve a better scheduling effect by adopting the task urgency rules.