Data Mining and Simulation Applied to a Staff Scheduling Problem

Staa scheduling is a complex problem encountered in almost all large businesses. Available manpower and skills must be deployed as eeectively as possible, while being exible enough to cope with the unexpected. This paper shows how high end PC technology in data-mining and simulation, as opposed to super-computing techniques, were applied to staa-scheduling in a large commercial organisation, where randomly uctuating demand and a requirement for a simple, xed schedule meant that optimisation techniques were not the most appropriate approach to the problem.