Abstract
This paper addresses a short-term production scheduling problem that arises in a German potash underground mine. In particular, we consider a combined staff and machine scheduling problem where mining operations have to be assigned to resources and scheduled simultaneously. The resources are composed of the machines and workers that are available in the upcoming working shift. Due to the given application, several mining-specific requirements have to be taken into account, e.g., how to handle mining operations within the same underground location. In order to solve the problem, we propose a construction procedure that is extended to a multi-start algorithm. In a computational study, we conduct experiments on random as well as real-world instances.
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The benchmarks (testset 1 and 2) presented herein may be downloaded from http://www.wiwi.tu-clausthal.de/abteilungen/unternehmensforschung/forschung/benchmark-instances/.
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Schulze, M., Zimmermann, J. Staff and machine shift scheduling in a German potash mine. J Sched 20, 635–656 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-017-0527-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-017-0527-z