This paper deals with a special case of Project Scheduling problem: there is a project to schedule, which is made up of activities linked by precedence relations. Each activity requires specific skills to be done. Moreover, resources are staff members who master fixed skill(s). Thus, each resource requirement of an activity corresponds to the number of persons doing the corresponding skill that...

This paper presents a constraint programming model and search strategy to formulate and solve staff scheduling problems in health care. This is a well-studied problem for which many different approaches have been developed over the years but it remains a challenge to successfully apply any given instance of a method to the various contexts encountered. We show how the main categories of rules i...

The traditional approaches to staffing and scheduling are often ineffective in assuring sufficient budgeting and deployment of staff to assure the right nurse at the right time for the right cost. As hospital merger activity increases, this exercise is further complicated by the need to rationalize staffing across multiple enterprises and standardize systems and processes. This Midwest hospital...

In a Multi-skill Project Scheduling Problem (MSPSP), there is a project, composed of activities, to realize. Each activity has to be done by a subset of staff members, chosen for their abilities to satisfy the needs of activities. In our problem, each person has different skill(s), and a level of ability for each of his skills. It is particularly adapted to modelize what happen in a software de...

What characteristics of an email message predict a users action on that message? Participants in a survey of university faculty, staff, and students provided data on the characteristics of new email messages and their actions based on the messages. Statistical analyses of responses revealed several factors that were important in predicting the fate of a message. These were: importance of a mess...

One of the critical problems in the call center industries is the staffing problem since they must face variable demands and because staff costs represent a major part of the costs of this industry. The problem of dimensioning a call center is modeled as a particular scheduling problem, where the objective is to minimize the weighted number of resources needed to perform the jobs. We present in...