A decomposition heuristic for rotational workforce scheduling
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A decomposition heuristic for rotational workforce scheduling Tristan Becker1
© The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Staff scheduling · Integer programming · Decomposition · Rotating Workforce Scheduling Problem
1 Introduction Human resources are typically one of the most expensive resources of a company. Shift planning thus plays a vital role for efficient operations. A sufficient staffing level must be ensured while legal and practical constraints are respected for each individual schedule. One of the most common requirements in shift scheduling is to work several consecutive days, as this typically implies multiple consecutive days off. Generally, it is possible to employ either a manual or rotational schedule. With a rotational schedule, every employee works the same schedule lagged in time. After a certain number of days, the rotational schedule repeats. Rotating schedules are especially well suited for organizations with static workforce demand, a work load that exceeds the working time of a single employee (e.g., 3 shifts per day, seven days a week) and homogeneous skill levels among employees. This structure is often found in manufacturing and
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Tristan Becker [email protected] RWTH Aachen University, School of Business and Economics, Chair of Operations Management, Kackertstraße 7, 52072 Aachen, Germany
organizations from the public sector such as emergency medical services, fire, and police departments (Laporte 1999). Once a suitable rotational schedule has been found, planning is greatly simplified as the manager and employees repeat the same sch
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