Determining the most appropriate set of weekly working hours for planning annualised working time

Annualised hours-the irregular distribution of working hours over a year-allow companies to adapt capacity to demand, thus reducing overtime, the number of temporary workers and inventory costs. To avoid a significant deterioration in working conditions, many laws and agreements constrain the distribution of working time. One way of doing this is by specifying a finite set of weekly working hours and bounding the annual number of weeks of each type. Although this set has a great impact on the solution, it is usually agreed without taking all the available data (demand, costs, etc.) into consideration. This paper proposes a method for selecting the most appropriate set of weekly working hours and establishing an annual plan or working time for each worker as a way of optimising service level. To this end, two mathematical programming models are proposed. By means of a computational experiment, it is shown that one of the models can be solved in short computing times and can thus be used as a decision-making tool. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.