An enhanced branch-and-bound algorithm for the talent scheduling problem

Hu Qin, School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan, China

Zizhen Zhang, School of Mobile Information Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

Andrew Lim, Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering National University of Singapore 1, Engineering Drive 2, Singapore 117576

Xiaocong Liang, Department of Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

ABSTRACT

The talent scheduling problem is a simplified version of the real-world film shooting problem, which aims to determine a shooting sequence so as to minimize the total cost of the actors involved. In this article, we first formulate the problem as an integer linear programming model. Next, we devise a branch-and-bound algorithm to solve the problem. The branch-and-bound algorithm is enhanced by several accelerating techniques, including preprocessing, dominance rules and caching search states. Extensive experiments over two sets of benchmark instances suggest that our algorithm is superior to the current best exact algorithm. Finally, the impacts of different parameter settings, algorithm components and instance generation distributions are disclosed by some additional experiments.