View article

We regard a break scheduling problem originating in the area of supervision personnel. The objective is to assign breaks to an existing shiftplan under consideration of various constraints reflecting legal demands, ergonomic criteria and staffing requirements. We propose a new method based on memetic algorithms to obtain good solutions for this problem. This metaheuristic approach is influenced by various parameters, for which we experimentally evaluate different settings. We compare our method to an existing min-conflicts based algorithm using publicly available benchmark instances. The memetic algorithm returns improved results on all the instances.