A list-scheduling heuristic for the short-term planning of assessment centers

Many companies operate assessment centers to help them select candidates for open job positions. During the assessment process, each candidate performs a set of tasks, and the candidates are evaluated by some so-called assessors. Additional constraints such as preparation and evaluation times, actors' participation in tasks, no-go relationships, and prescribed time windows for lunch breaks contribute to the complexity of planning such assessment processes. We propose a multi-pass list-scheduling heuristic for this novel planning problem; to this end, we develop novel procedures for devising appropriate scheduling lists and for generating a feasible schedule. The computational results for a set of example problems that represent or are derived from real cases indicate that the heuristic generates optimal or near-optimal schedules within relatively short CPU times.