Food inspector scheduling with outcome and daily-schedule effects

Abstract

Food-safety inspection is regularly executed by the government for quality assessment. Evidence from recent research demonstrates that inspection accuracy and consistency are affected by inspection biases that result from an operational decision: inspector scheduling. More precisely, an inspector's stringency in an inspection is affected by the inspection results at the previous-inspected establishment (outcome effects) and when this inspection occurs within a workday (daily-schedule effects). To our best knowledge, the impact of these effects on scheduling decisions has not been studied in the scheduling literature. In this paper, we study a novel food inspector scheduling problem with these effects, where the inspector should scrutinise establishments with different locations. The problem is viewed as a single-machine scheduling problem with a complex objective function including (i) inspection accuracy, (ii) inspection consistency and (iii) workload of the inspector. To facilitate quantitative analyses of these effects, we model them by sequence-dependent functions and formulate a mixed integer linear programming model. To overcome the computational difficulty in large-scale problems, an efficient Tabu Search algorithm is developed. Experiment results on 135 randomly generated instances with up to 50 establishments and 10 workdays validate the efficiency of the solution method. Besides, managerial insights are drawn.