Equivalent Alternate Solutions for the Tour Scheduling Problem*
提出一种启发式方法，为服务员工排班问题生成一组成本相同的可行替代方案，帮助管理者在保持最低成本的同时，提升员工满意度和服务一致性。
ABSTRACT Achieving minimum staffing costs, maximum employee satisfaction with their assigned schedules, and acceptable levels of service are important but potentially conflicting objectives when scheduling service employees. Existing employee scheduling models, such as tour scheduling or general employee scheduling, address at most two of these criteria. This paper describes a heuristic to improve tour scheduling solutions provided by other procedures, and generate a set of equivalent cost feasible alternatives. These alternatives allow managers to identify solutions with attractive secondary characteristics, such as overall employee satisfaction with their assigned tours or consistent employee workloads and customer response times. Tests with both full‐time and mixed work force problems reveal the method improves most nonoptimal initial heuristic solutions. Many of the alternatives generated had more even distributions of surplus staff than the initial solutions, yielding more consistent customer response times and employee workloads. The likelihood of satisfying employee scheduling preferences may also be increased since each alternative provides a different deployment of employees among the available schedules.