Towards a practical engineering tool for rostering

Edward Tsang (), John Ford, Patrick Mills, Richard Bradwell, Richard Williams and Paul Scott

Annals of Operations Research, 2007, vol. 155, issue 1, 257-277

Abstract: The profitability and morale of many organizations (such as factories, hospitals and airlines) are affected by their ability to schedule their personnel properly. Sophisticated and powerful constraint solvers such as ILOG, CHIP, ECLiPSe, etc. have been demonstrated to be extremely effective on scheduling. Unfortunately, they require non-trivial expertise to use. This paper describes ZDC-rostering, a constraint-based tool for personnel scheduling that addresses the software crisis and fills a void in the space of solvers. ZDC-rostering is easier to use than the above constraint-based solvers and more effective than Microsoft’s Excel Solver. ZDC-rostering is based on an open-source computer-aided constraint programming package called ZDC, which decouples problem formulation (or modelling) from solution generation in constraint satisfaction. ZDC is equipped with a set of constraint algorithms, including Extended Guided Local Search, whose efficiency and effectiveness have been demonstrated in a wide range of applications. Our experiments show that ZDC-rostering is capable of solving realistic-sized and very tightly-constrained problems efficiently. ZDC-rostering demonstrates the feasibility of applying constraint satisfaction techniques to solving rostering problems, without having to acquire deep knowledge in constraint technology. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10479-007-0217-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:annopr:v:155:y:2007:i:1:p:257-277:10.1007/s10479-007-0217-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-007-0217-x

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().