A Constraint Programming Application for Rotating Workforce Scheduling

Triska, Markus; Musliu, Nysret

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-21332-8_12

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…So far the problem has been addressed with a range of different methods. Complete approaches include a network flow formulation (Balakrishnan and Wong 1990), integer linear programming (Laporte, Nobert, and Biron 1980), several constraint programming formulations (Laporte 1999;Musliu, Gärtner, and Slany 2002;Laporte and Pesant 2004;Triska and Musliu 2011) and an approach with satisfiability modulo theories (Erkinger and Musliu 2017). There is also work on heuristic approaches (Musliu 2005;2006), the creation of rotating schedules by hand (Laporte 1999), and using algebraic methods (Falcón et al 2016).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exact Methods for Extended Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problems

Kletzander

Musliu

Gärtner³

et al. 2021

ICAPS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In many professions daily demand for different shifts varies during the week. The rotating workforce scheduling problem deals with the creation of repeating schedules for such demand and is therefore of high practical relevance. This paper investigates solving this real-life problem with several new practically relevant features. This includes early recognition of certain infeasibility criteria, complex rest time constraints regarding weekly rest time, and optimization goals to deal with optimal assignments of free weekends. We introduce a state-of-the-art constraint model and evaluate it with different extensions. The evaluation shows that many real-life instances can be solved to optimality using a constraint solver. Our approach is under deployment in a state-of-the-art commercial solver for rotating workforce scheduling.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exact Methods for Extended Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problems

Kletzander

Musliu

Gärtner³

et al. 2021

ICAPS

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For some instances, their approach is faster than the state of the art, while the overall performance is comparable. Triska and Musliu (2011) propose a constraint programming formulation for the RWS. As a constraint programming formulation, it represents an exact method.…”

Section: Rotational Workforce Schedulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several studies propose exact and heuristic methods for the RWS (Triska and Musliu 2011;Mutingi and Mbohwa 2015a;Erkinger and Musliu 2017;Musliu et al 2018). Given the importance of rotational shift scheduling, efficient computational methods are a continuing interest of research.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A decomposition heuristic for rotational workforce scheduling

Becker

2020

J Sched

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In rotational workforce planning, a schedule is constructed from a sequence of work and rest periods. Each employee starts at a different part of the schedule, and after a certain amount of time, the schedule repeats. The length of the schedule increases with a higher number of employees. At the same time, various constraints on work sequences and days off have to be considered. For a large number of employees, it is difficult to construct a schedule that meets the requirements. It is important to ensure low solution times independently of the problem instance characteristics. In this work, a novel decomposition approach for rotational shift scheduling is proposed. The decomposition exploits the fact that most constraints in rotational workforce scheduling are imposed on the work shift sequence. By considering a fixed set of blocks to cover the demand, the problem complexity can be greatly reduced. Given a fixed set of blocks, we propose a network model that determines whether a feasible sequence of shift blocks exists. The decomposition approach is applied to the problem structure of the Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problem but may be extended to different problem structures. In a computational study, the decomposition approach is compared to a mathematical formulation and previous exact and heuristic approaches. Computational results show that the decomposition approach greatly outperforms previous heuristics on the standard benchmarks.

show abstract

“…So far the problem has been addressed with a range of different methods. Complete approaches include a network flow formulation [2], integer linear programming [10], several constraint programming formulations [9,11,16,25] and an approach with satisfiability modulo theories [5]. There is also work on heuristic approaches [14], including the metaheuristic we use for our evaluation [15], further the creation of rotating schedules by hand [9], and using algebraic methods [6].…”

Section: Rotating Workforce Schedulingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Instance space analysis for a personnel scheduling problem

Kletzander

Musliu

Smith‐Miles

2020

Ann Math Artif Intell

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper considers the Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problem, and shows how the strengths and weaknesses of various solution methods can be understood by the in-depth evaluation offered by a recently developed methodology known as Instance Space Analysis. We first present a set of features aiming to describe hardness of test instances. We create a new, more diverse set of instances based on an initial instance space analysis that reveals gaps in the instance space, and offers the opportunity to generate additional instances to add diversity to the test suite. The results of three algorithms on our extended instance set reveal insights based on this visual methodology. We observe different regions of strength and weakness in the instance space for each algorithm, as well as a phase transition from feasible to infeasible instances with more challenging instances at the phase transition boundary. This rigorous and insightful approach to analyzing algorithm performance highlights the critical role played by the choice of test instances, and the importance of ensuring diversity and unbiasedness of test instances to support valid conclusions.

show abstract

A Constraint Programming Application for Rotating Workforce Scheduling

Cited by 5 publications

References 8 publications

Exact Methods for Extended Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problems

Exact Methods for Extended Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problems

A decomposition heuristic for rotational workforce scheduling

Instance space analysis for a personnel scheduling problem

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About