Security personnel routing and rostering: a hyper-heuristic approach

In the present study, a large scale, structured problem regarding the routing and rostering of security personnel is investigated. Structured problems are combinatorial optimization problems that encompass characteristics of more than one known problem in operational research. The problem deals with assigning the available personnel to visits associated with a set of customers. This objective just described, reflects the rostering characteristic of the problem. In addition, the different geographic locations of the customers indicate the requirement of routing. A new benchmark dataset for this complex problem is presented. A group of high-level problem-independent methods, i.e. hyper-heuristics, is used to solve this novel problem. The performance and behaviour of different hyper-heuristics for the presented benchmark dataset are analysed.