Tour Scheduling

Tour Scheduling (also Workforce Tour Scheduling or Labor Tour Scheduling) is the operations research problem in which a 7-day 24-hour service operation must assign weekly (or n-week cyclic) tour patterns — sequences of shifts and rest days — to its employees, so that each hour's staffing demand is met, weekly work-hour limits respected, days-off / consecutive-day / consecutive-night rules satisfied, fairness across employees preserved, and total cost minimised. Dantzig (1954) introduced the classical set-covering formulation in a toll-booth staffing context; Bechtold and Brusco (1991) wrote the modern compact (implicit) formulation that solves realistic instances polynomially; Ernst, Jiang, Krishnamoorthy and Sier (2004) authored the canonical survey of staff scheduling and rostering, distinguishing tour scheduling from days-off scheduling, shift scheduling and crew scheduling. Practical solution methods range from set-covering MIP and implicit MIP to column generation (branch-and-price) and metaheuristics (genetic algorithm, tabu search). Tour scheduling sits at a higher planning layer than single-shift assignment (#003) and hourly Erlang-C staffing (#023).