A new tabu search procedure for an audit‐scheduling problem

Abstract

We consider the following version of the auditing problem. A set of jobs must be processed by auditors A , . . . , A K . Each job consists of several tasks and there may be precedence constraints between these tasks. There is a due date associated with each job. Each auditor is available during disjoint time periods. Furthermore, s/he has a minimal and maximal working time. If task i is assigned to an auditor A H , the processing time is p GH and the processing costs are c GH . A task assigned to auditor A H can be preempted only at the end of one of the working periods of A H . In this case it must be continued at the beginning of the next period.One has to assign the tasks to the auditors and "nd a feasible schedule for the assigned tasks for each auditor such that the sum of the assignment costs and a weighted sum of tardiness values is minimized.A tabu search procedure for this problem is described and computational results are presented.KEY WORDS: audit scheduling; tabu search; time windows 4. the precedence constraints are not violated, and 5. tasks of J J do not start before r J .Given a schedule (for all auditors), the "nishing time C J of J J is the latest "nishing time of all tasks of J J . Our objective is to assign each task i to an auditor A ? G and to construct a feasible schedule such that the sum of mismatching costs and weighted sum of tardiness ¹ J "max +0, C J !d J ,, i.e.

Tactical Audit Planning

“…The authors apply their approach to a medium-size international accounting firm. Finally, Brucker and Schumacher (1999) without featuring travel, introduce job release times and time-windows for auditor availability.…”