Automated Shift Design and Break Scheduling

Abstract

Shift design and break scheduling are important employee scheduling problems that arise in many contexts, especially at airports, call centers, and service industries. The aim is to find a minimum number of legal shifts, the number of workers assigned to them, and a suitable number of breaks so that the deviation from predetermined workforce requirements is minimized. Such problems have been extensively investigated in Operations Research and recently have been also tackled with Artificial Intelligence techniques. In this chapter we outline major characteristics of these problems and provide a literature survey over solution techniques to solve them. We then describe in detail two state-of-the-art approaches based on local search techniques. Finally, we discuss our experiences with the application of one of these techniques in a real life case study.

Modeling and solving a real-life multi-skill shift design problem

“…However, similarly to previous work (see, e.g., Di Gaspero et al 2013), the states of the search space are not composed only of the shifts actually used by workers, as in Table 4, but also by a set of so-called inactive shifts. Inactive shifts have no workers, but can become active by means of moves that increase the number of workers or transfer a worker from another shift.…”

“…Solving the shift design problem together with break scheduling by a method that combines constraint programming and local search has been investigated in Di Gaspero et al (2010). An overview of previous work on shift design and break scheduling is provided in Di Gaspero et al (2013). All the works mentioned above deal with the single-skill employees.…”

“…We design a new search method based on a fast Simulated Annealing (SA), that, differently from previous approaches (see Di Gaspero et al 2013), solves the overall problem as a singlestage procedure. The core of the method is a composite neighborhood that includes, at the same time, changes in the staffing of shifts, the shape of shifts, and the position of breaks.…”

An Overview of a Break Assignment Problem Considering Area Coverage

“…Beer et al [1] address a complex real-world break-scheduling problem for supervisory personnel and present a scheduling system that can help professional planners create high-quality shift plans. Similarly, Di Gaspero et al [4] also consider the problem of scheduling breaks that fulfill different constraints about their placement and lengths.…”

Shift Design with Answer Set Programming*

“…The inclusion of breaks into shift design was considered in [18,19,20,21]. A detailed overview of previous work on shift design and break scheduling is given in [22].…”