Survey on models and methodology for emergency relief and staff scheduling

Decision support is required for effective planning on all kinds of scheduling scenarios. The stochastic scenarios and uncertainty in demands make the scheduling task complex. Multiple objectives in terms of cost, timing window, priorities and travel routes are the driving factors in the scheduling task. These objectives are often associated with given constraints like time, cost, resource limit etc. To meet all these objectives with the given constraints, it requires effective scheduling methods. Among different application areas of scheduling, emergency relief and staff scheduling are two domains which present major challenges for the scheduling research. These two areas provide analogy with many other areas of scheduling. Issues like finding appropriate locations and establishing them in appropriate group, discovering effective path for routing and making efficient plan for distribution and servicing are major challenges for these two and related scheduling cases. This paper covers a survey study on some of the recent papers of these areas that highlights the problem formulations, technologies, methods and algorithms applied. It provides a literature review on technologies and algorithms applied in the area of emergency case relief scheduling and staff scheduling.