Stochastic Check-in Employee Scheduling Problem

This work addresses the problem of assigning airline check-in employees to tasks related to departing flights under uncertain circumstance at an international terminal of a large airport. The uncertainty of flight departing time mainly stems from delays and traffic control. Airlines specifics the minimum and target number of staff for each flight task in each time period. Taking uncertain tasks starting time into account and introducing risk measure (e.g., conditional value-at-risk) into optimization objective function, we present a risk-averse two-stage stochastic model with the mixed-integer recourse that minimizes both staffing costs and risk measurement to respond the time uncertainty. The first-stage decision is to make personal-area allocation plan; and the particular personnel-task scheduling decisions are determined in the second stage as the actual flight departing times are realized. To solve the NP-hard problem, a progressive hedging algorithm is proposed. Numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach as compared with a sample average approximation method. Finally, we utilize a real-world case to illustrate how the proposed method can be used to obtain a near-optimal solution for practical problem.