Workforce Scheduling

Workforce allocation and personnel scheduling deal with the arrangement of work schedules and the assignment of personnel to shifts in order to cover the demand for resources that vary over time. These problems are very important in service industries,e.g ., telephone operators, hospital nurses,p olicemen, transportation personnel (plane crews,bus drivers),a nd so on. In these environments the operations are often prolonged and irregular and the staff requirements fluctuate over time. The schedules are typically subject to various constraints dictated by equipment requirements,unio n rules, and so on. The resulting problems tend to be combinatorially hard. In this chapter we first consider a somewhat elementary personnel scheduling problem for which there is a relatively simple solution.We then describe an integer programming framework that encompasses a large class of personnel scheduling problems. We subsequently consider a special class of these integer programming problems, namely the cyclic staffing problems. This class of problems has many applications in practice and is easy from a combinatorial point of view. We then consider several special cases and extensions of cyclic staffing. In the sixth section we discuss the crew scheduling problems that occur in the airline industry. In the subsequent section we describe a case that involves the scheduling of operators in a call center.