In recent years, labour negotiations for seven-day-week organizations such as hospitals, mining companies and chemical industries have seen an increased emphasis on improving shift schedules. This paper gives an exact lower bound on the number of workers required to satisfy such primary contractual commitments as ensuring that each employee receives at least A out of every B weekends off, everyone works exactly five days per week, and no one works more than six consecutive days. The model addressed is general in that it allows the number of workers required each day to vary. The proof that the bound is the best possible is constructive. A linear time algorithm is presented that generates schedules satisfying all the primary objectives. Extensions discuss means of incorporating secondary objectives such as giving pairs of adjacent days off.labor, organizational studies: manpower planning, production/scheduling

This paper synthesizes many of the recent articles about prototyping and contrasts prototyping with the more traditional systems life cycle approach to application development. As some projects are more suited to one methodology than the other, this paper presents a contingency approach, based on project size and project uncertainty, to selecting the most appropriate application development methodology for a given project.

This paper introduces a practical approach to multiple-shift manpower scheduling by presenting an algorithm that applies the approach to a large and common class of problems. The algorithm constructs schedules that utilize no more than the minimum number of workers necessary for a schedule satisfying constraints that include two offdays each week, a specified number of offweekends in any fixed number of consecutive weekends, a maximum of six consecutive work shifts and different staffing demands for each type of shift. We discuss the application of the approach to several other classes of manpower scheduling problems.

A work force includes workers of m types. The worker categories are ordered, with type-1 workers the most highly qualified, type-2 the next, and so on. If the need arises, a type-k worker is able to substitute for a worker of any type j greater than k (k = 1, ..., m - 1). For 7-day-a-week operation, daily requirements are for at least Dk workers of type-k or better, of which at least dk must be precisely type-k. Formulas are given to find the smallest number and most economical mix of workers, assuming that each worker must have 2 off-days per week and a given fraction of weekends off. Algorithms are presented which generate a feasible schedule, and provide work stretches between 2 and 5 days, and consecutive weekdays off when on duty for 2 weekends in a row, without additional staff.

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