Min Conflicts Based Heuristics for Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problem

Workforce scheduling problems are typical constraint satisfaction problems in which different constraints must be fulfilled, like needed workforce per day, forbidden sequences of shifts, length of work and days-off blocks etc. There are two main variants of workforce schedules: rotating (or cyclic) workforce schedules and non-cyclic workforce schedules. In a rotating workforce schedule all employees have the same basic schedule but start with different offsets. For this problem we have given (for formal definition see [10]): number of employees: n, set of m shifts, length of schedule, temporal requirements, constraints about the sequences of shifts permitted to be assigned to employees (the complement of inadmissible sequences), maximum and minimum length of periods of consecutive shifts and maximum and minimum length of blocks of work days and days off. The aim is to find a cyclic schedule (assignment of shifts to employees) that satisfies the requirement matrix and fulfill all given hard constraints.