Abstract This paper investigates the manpower allocation problem with time windows and job-teaming constraints (MAPTWTC), a practical scheduling and routing problem that tries to synchronize workers’ schedules to complete all tasks. We first provide an integer programming model for the problem and discuss its properties. Next, we show that tree data structure can be used to represent the MAPTWTC solutions, and its optimal solution can be obtained from one of trees by solving a minimum cost flow model for each worker type. Consequently, we develop for the problem a novel tabu search algorithm employing search operators based on the tree data structure. Finally, we prove the effectiveness of the tabu search algorithm by computational experiments on two sets of instances.