The Traveling Employees Problem

Abstract

Student employment agencies face the daily challenge of making sure that their employees reach the scheduled work location on time with as little travel time as possible, all the while trying to keep the financial cost low. This problem could be called the Travelling Employees Problem (TEP). This research has two objectives, first to formulate a conceptual model; it should solve the TEP to support the efficiency of expert planners. Second, this model will be implemented in the form of a computer script. This implementation should be sufficiently fast in terms of computational time. Based on these objectives four questions can be posed. What concepts could be used to solve the travelling employees problem? This question is answered by reviewing literature about the space time prism, clustering, and the value of commuting time. How can these concepts be used to form a model that solves the travelling employees problem? This question is answered by aligning the found concepts to form a heuristic model. How does this model perform? This question is answered by performing a case study on historic data from the student employment agency LINQ in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. How do experts judge the implemented model? Three experts are asked to first compete against the model, and later to judge the validity of model output. It is concluded that the model is able to support expert planners, but not (yet) replace them.