This paper is concerned with an employee scheduling problem involving multiple shifts and work centers, where employees belong to a hierarchy of categories having downward substitutability. An employee at a higher category may perform the duties of an employee at a lower category, but not vice versa. However, a higher category employee receives a higher compensation than a lower category employ...

An efficient optimum solution is presented for a real-life employee daysoff scheduling problem with a three-week cycle. Over a given work cycle, each worker is given 14 successive workdays and 7 successive off days. This three-week days-off timetable is referred to as the (14, 21) schedule. Given different labor demands for each day of the week, the primary objective is to minimize the number o...

Over the last 40 years, major changes have taken place in the workplace. The growth in the use of information technology at work, the globalization of many industries, organizational restructuring, changes in work contracts and worktime scheduling have radically transformed the nature of work in many organizations. The workforce itself is also diversifying, with an increase in female participat...

Assigning scheduled tasks to a multi-skilled workforce is a known NP-complete problem with many applications in health care, services, logistics and manufacturing. Optimising the use and composition of costly and scarce resources such as staff has major implications on any organisation’s health. The present paper introduces a new, versatile two-phase matheuristic approach to the shift minimisat...

In this paper we present a computational study on 112 instances of the workforce scheduling and routing problem (WSRP). This problem has applications in many service provider industries where employees are required to visit customers to perform certain activities. Given their similarity, we adapt a mathematical programming model from the literature on vehicle routing problem with time windows (...

ORTEC is a Netherlands-based software company selling decision support systems based on operations research models. One of her products is HARMONY, a workforce scheduling package. We developed a model to predict its return on investment for a specific customer. The model uses a database of reference implementations to find organizations that are similar to the prospective customer’s organizatio...

We describe CP-Rota, a new constraint programming application for rotating workforce scheduling that is currently being developed at our institute to solve real-life problems from industry. It is intended to complement FCS, a previously developed application. The advantages of CP-Rota over FCS are a significantly smaller and more maintainable code base, portability across a range of different l...

We develop and test an integrated forecasting and stochastic programming approach to workforce management in call centers. We first demonstrate that parametric forecasts can be used to drive stochastic programs whose results are stable with relatively small numbers of scenarios. We then extend our approach to include forecast updates and two-stage stochastic programs with recourse and provide a...

The minimum shift design problem (MSD) is a scheduling problem that commonly arises in workforce management activities. Given a collection of shifts and workforce requirements, the problem consists in finding a minimum cardinality set of work shifts, and the number of workers to assign to each shift, in order to meet (or minimize the deviation from) prespecified staff requirements. This problem...

Scheduling for production in manufacturing environments requires an immense amount of planning. A large number of factors such as part availability, production cost, space constraints and labor supply must be taken into account. Considering these factors, tasks are scheduled into shifts and allocated the required human resources. However, when actual production begins, the original schedule mus...