Personnel scheduling or roster problems studies have been performed, and several approaches have been formulated with a wide applicability to different industries, as in the case of airline companies that require the construction of work timetables for its staff with special focus on minimizing costs and improving efficiency. Although many approaches to airline scheduling problems have been performed, these approaches have not been focused on optimization for customer service agents scheduling in airport operations that in the real scheduling practices have several drawbacks, because they do not consider the fluctuation of booking reservations that is a crucial consideration needed to avoid a waste of resources in overcapacity or shortage in terms of human resources. Therefore, this study proposes a realistic method to solve scheduling problems for customer service agents in airport station operations, and this method considers booking reservation fluctuations as a base to perform the scheduling process efficiently to generate a versatile planning tool for airport managers that can calculate the correct number of employees to be scheduled on weekly or monthly bases, in addition to the advantage of flexibility to manually modify the schedule as the operations situations require. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the method with approaches using an analysis by comparison between real practice and the scheduling model applied in weekly and monthly scenarios, with alternative solutions available.
Personnel scheduling or roster problems studies have been performed, and several approaches have been formulated with a wide applicability to different industries, as in the case of airline companies that require the construction of work timetables for its staff with special focus on minimizing costs and improving efficiency. Although many approaches to airline scheduling problems have been performed, these approaches have not been focused on optimization for customer service agents scheduling in airport operations that in the real scheduling practices have several drawbacks, because they do not consider the fluctuation of booking reservations that is a crucial consideration needed to avoid a waste of resources in overcapacity or shortage in terms of human resources. Therefore, this study proposes a realistic method to solve scheduling problems for customer service agents in airport station operations, and this method considers booking reservation fluctuations as a base to perform the scheduling process efficiently to generate a versatile planning tool for airport managers that can calculate the correct number of employees to be scheduled on weekly or monthly bases, in addition to the advantage of flexibility to manually modify the schedule as the operations situations require. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the method with approaches using an analysis by comparison between real practice and the scheduling model applied in weekly and monthly scenarios, with alternative solutions available.