A decomposition heuristic for rotational workforce scheduling

Tristan Becker ()
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Tristan Becker: RWTH Aachen University, School of Business and Economics, Chair of Operations Management

Journal of Scheduling, 2020, vol. 23, issue 5, No 2, 539-554

Abstract: 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10951-020-00659-2

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