This paper presents a review of staff scheduling and rostering, an area that has become increasingly important as business becomes more service oriented and cost conscious in a global environment. Optimised staff schedules can provide enormous benefits, but require carefully implemented decision support systems if an organisation is to meet customer demands in a cost effective manner while sati...

There is considerable interest in the use of genetic algorithms to solve problems arising in the areas of scheduling and timetabling. However, the classical genetic algorithm paradigm is not well equipped to handle the conflict between objectives and constraints that typically occurs in such problems. In order to overcome this, successful implementations frequently make use of problem specific ...

Nurse scheduling is a complex scheduling problem and involves generating a schedule for each nurse that consists of shift duties and days off within a short-term planning period. In real world applications, multiple sources of uncertainties are needed to be treated in providing higher quality schedules. This paper presents a seminal research on the application of fuzzy set theory to the nurse s...

In this paper we deal with the Nurse Scheduling Problem (NSP) in a hospital. The problem aims to generate a feasible and a satisfactory schedule to the planners and the hospital staffs. Sometimes a large number of constraints are taken into account: preferences of staffs (vacation, public holidays, and special demands) and administrative or union obligations, in order to ensure a good working c...

We study a shift scheduling problem for call centers with an overall service level objective. We prove a property of this problem, called multimodularity, that ensures that a local search algorithm terminates with a globally optimal solution. We report on computations we did with real call center data.

In contrast to standard constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) practical applications often require both, the management of changing validity of constraints and variables. Based on experiences made with the development of a commercial nurse scheduling system this paper suggests the application of local optimization algorithms for knowledge-based conngura-tion systems, which strongly rely on dy...

In contrast to standard constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) practical applications often require both, the management of changing validity of constraints and variables. Based on experiences made with the development of a commercial nurse scheduling system this paper suggests the application of local optimization algorithms for knowledge-based connguration systems, which strongly rely on dyn...

We consider a workforce management problem arising in call centers, namely the shift-scheduling problem. It consists in determining the number of agents to be assigned to a set of predefined shifts so as to optimize the trade-off between manpower cost and customer quality of service. We focus on explicitly taking into account in the shift-scheduling problem the uncertainties in the future call ...

The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) has received a great amount of attention in recent years. In the NSP, the goal is to assign shifts to the nurses in order to satisfy the hospital’s demand during the planning horizon by considering different objective functions. In this research, we focus on maximizing the nurses’ preferences for working shifts and weekends off by considering several important...

Design and development of robust and reliable scheduling algorithms has been an active research area in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Given that the general problem is computationally intractable, many heuristic-based techniques have been developed, while other approaches have used optimising techniques for specific and limited problem domains. In this paper, we consider a large...