Quantitative Approaches on Staff Scheduling and Rostering in Hospitality Management: An Overview

Abstract

Staff scheduling and rostering problems, with application in several application areas, from transportation systems to hospitals, have been widely addressed by researchers. This is not the case of hospitality services, which have been forgotten by the quantitative research literature. The purpose of this paper is to provide some insights on the application of staff scheduling and rostering problems to hospitality management operations, reviewing existing approaches developed in other similar areas, such as nurse rostering or examining adaptable problem models, such as the tour scheduling.

Optimal workforce assignment to operations of a paced assembly line

“…They were initiated in the 19th century and have become classics of combinatorial optimization, see the monograph of Burkard et al [16]. Later on, a number of practical constraints were taken into consideration in timetabling, rostering, shift scheduling and resource constrained project scheduling models, as it was described, e.g., in Willemen [63], Ernst et al [27], Naveh et al [47], Rocha et al [51],…”

Impact of Flexibility and Employees' Preferences on Shift Scheduling: a Simulation Approach

“…Several studies have emphasized the importance and positive impact of employees" satisfaction and measures that improve their productivities" quality at work) [17][18][19][20]. In addition, several studies have incorporated dimensions related to employees" preferences in the process of solving the problem of personnel scheduling) [21][22][23][24][25][26].The most frequent aspects in the scheduling preferences are related to the shift duration, the number of weekly working hours, the number of consecutive working days, the model of rotation among employees, and resting days. To the best of our knowledge, most related to personnel scheduling studies were limited to the modeling of the problem taking into account aspects of preferences and the search for a better approach to resolution.…”

Staff unavailability and safe staffing: are headroom allowances ‘realistic’?

“…Clearly, the effective use of existing staff is imperative. The objective of workforce scheduling (rostering) is to ensure hospital units have the appropriate staff available to meet the clinical needs of their patients (Rocha et al 2011). However, staff rosters, typically published 4-8 weeks before they are worked, are based upon a forecast level of patient demand contained within a 'demand template' (Drake 2018).…”