A decomposition heuristic for rotational workforce scheduling

Abstract

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.

A Practical Staff Scheduling Strategy Considering Various Types of Employment in the Construction Industry

“…Human resource is crucial in many operations that are heavily labor-oriented. In addition, it is typically one of the most expensive resources of a company [13,14]. That means that human resources are regarded as one of the most important factors to manage in every business.…”

“…Equation ( 13) is about the assignment of a manager for supervision and one manager should work on each floor. Equation ( 14) means two workers doing Job 2 must be on one of two floors at least: (14) Equations ( 15) and (16) determine the allocation to open storage. Equation ( 15) represents that more than two employees are needed for open storage.…”

A Stochastic Capital-Labour Model with Logistic Growth Function

“…They are influenced by demographic factors and the gross domestic product, which vary from household to household. In our context, the supply of labour is represented by the number of free jobs and the demand for labour, noting that the workforce or labour force is the total number of people eligible to work [1,3].…”

Computer-Aided Generation of N-shift RWS

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All around the world, research institutes and industrial complexes make use of workforces working multiple shifts per day in order to utilise maximum efficiency and profitability of the facility. Creating shift work schedules has, however, always been a challenging task, especially such that are equal for all workers and at the same time distributes the shifts evenly and properly to prevent staff burnout (Becker, 2020).The purpose and aim of this package is to support research institutes and industrial complexes at which non-standard working hours are applicable with a computational tool to create rotational workforce schedules by providing the user (schedule-maker) with all possible schedules for a set of input constraints/conditions (such as shift lengths, weekly working hours and -resting time) by constructing and utilising a Combinatoric Generator and a Cartesian Product calculator.Comparing to already available software that (by the developer/author) could be found, this method uses a computational semi-automatic approach rather than the more traditional manual creation of schedules. This computational approach is also able to check and identify every combination that could satisfy the required rotational workforce schedule, if there are any that fully satisfy the requirements.

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“…All around the world, research institutes and industrial complexes make use of workforces working multiple shifts per day in order to utilise maximum efficiency and profitability of the facility. Creating shift work schedules has, however, always been a challenging task, especially such that are equal for all workers and at the same time distributes the shifts evenly and properly to prevent staff burnout (Becker, 2020).…”