Talent Hold Cost Minimization in Film Production

This paper investigates the talent scheduling problem in film production, which is known as rehearsal scheduling in music and dance performances. The first lower bound on the minimization of talent hold cost is based upon the outside-in branching strategy. We introduce two approaches to add extra terms for tightening the lower bound. The first approach is to formulate a maximum weighted matching problem. The second approach is to retrieve structural information and solve a maximum weighted 3-grouping problem. We make two contributions: First, our results can fathom the matrix of a given partial schedule. Second, our second approach is free from the requirement to schedule some shooting days in advance for providing anchoring information as in the other approaches, i.e., a lower bound can be computed once the input instance is given. The lower bound can fit different branching strategies. Moreover, the second contribution provides a state-of-the-art research result for this problem. Computational experiments confirm that the new bounds are much tighter than the original one.