Abstract
We address the problem of strategic workforce planning for airport ground staff. The goal is to find a minimum workforce mix that satisfies a target coverage rate with respect to a given demand profile. Based on the classical tour scheduling problem, we propose a new formulation with hierarchical skills in which staff with higher level skills is permitted to cover demands of lower levels. A branch-and-price approach is proposed to solve the model. Numerical experiments based on real-world demand data demonstrate that our approach can efficiently produce near-optimal solutions to the model.


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Acknowledgements
This research is supported in part by Pearl River S&T Nova Program of Guangzhou (201610010188). We wish to thank Chunlei Mu, Shuai Tian, and other colleagues in our team for their excellent work on the project. We would like to acknowledge the help of two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments to improve the paper.
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Zeng, L., Zhao, M. & Liu, Y. Airport ground workforce planning with hierarchical skills: a new formulation and branch-and-price approach. Ann Oper Res 275, 245–258 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2624-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2624-y