In spite of its tremendous economic significance, the problem of sales staff schedule optimization for retail stores has received relatively scant attention. Current approaches typically attempt to minimize payroll costs by closely fitting a staffing curve derived from exogenous sales forecasts,...

We present a tactical wood flow model that appears in the context of the Canadian forestry industry, and describe the implementation of a decision support system created for use by an industrial partner. In this problem, mill demands and harvested volumes of a heterogeneous set of log types are...

This paper studies a districting problem that arises in the context of financial product pricing. The challenge lies in partitioning a set of small geographical regions into a set of larger territories. In each territory, the customers will share a common price. These territories need to be...

The dairy transportation problem (DTP) consists of determining the best routes to be performed for collecting milk from farms and delivering it to processing plants. We study the particular case of the province of Quebec, where the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec is responsible...

The multi-vehicle covering tour problem (m-CTP) involves finding a minimum-length set of vehicle routes passing through a subset of vertices, subject to constraints on the length of each route and the number of vertices that it contains, such that each vertex not included in any route lies...

This paper presents a new implicit formulation for shift scheduling problems, using context-free grammars to model the rules for the composition of shifts. From the grammar, we generate an integer programming (IP) model having a linear programming relaxation equivalent to that of the classical...

This paper presents a constraint programming approach for a batch processing machine on which a finite number of jobs of non-identical sizes must be scheduled. A parallel batch processing machine can process several jobs simultaneously and the objective is to minimize the maximal lateness. The...